Ted Bradshaw Obituary

Ted was one of the hosts of the Rural Development Leadership Network Summer Institute at U.C. Davis. We mourn the passing of a good friend and colleague.

August 11, 2006

Obituary: Ted Bradshaw
By Susanne Rockwell

Ted Bradshaw, a UC Davis professor of community development who helped California communities grapple with base closures, energy issues and creating healthy social systems, died Aug. 5 while jogging near his home in Oakland. He was 63.
Trained as a rural sociologist, Bradshaw came to the Department of Human and Community Development as an assistant professor in 1995 after a nearly 20-year career as a researcher and lecturer at UC Berkeley. He made full professor in June.

Bradshaw was a leader in the areas of rural development, community development and energy policy. Most recently, he chaired the effort to establish the new Center for the Study of Regional Change and was appointed last year as director of the Gifford Center for Population Studies, which focuses on population issues in California's Central Valley.

Dear Friends and Acquaintances:

Please forgive this broadsweeping communication. I wanted to make sure that this news reached as many of the friends of our family as possible in haste.

My healthy and exceptionally energetic husband of 35 years, Ted Bradshaw, collapsed from a heart attack on the Lake Temescal running trail on Saturday morning August 5, 2006. Courageous and generous attempts at resuscitation by nearby witnesses as well as fire and ambulance paramedics failed to revive him.

My son Niels was with me when the police brought us to Ted in the Summit Hospital Emergency Room. We were blessed with 6 hours to be with a man at peace who lived his life loving everything he did. Initially our most pressing project was to bring our youngest son Liam home from Europe, where he was working for the summer. Our family is together now and we have been comforted by the amazing outpouring of affection and support that has come our way.

There will be a memorial service in Berkeley next Friday (details below) as well as a memorial service at UC Davis, probably in October. Feel free to forward this information to anyone you think would want this sad news or information about services.

Please pray for the repose of Ted's good hearted soul and for me and my sons as we build a new life in spirit with him.


Sincerely,

Betty Lou, Niels and Liam


Memorial Mass for Ted K. Bradshaw
Friday, August 18, 2006
2:00 p.m.
Newman Holy Spirit Parish
2700 Dwight Way (at College Avenue)
Berkeley, California, 94704
(510) 848-7812
Reception to follow near the UC Berkeley Campus

Kingston, Ontario

Nurses Should Get Organized

The nursing profession has historically been one of the most important in medicine and least respected. Given the cost of health care, nurses are hardly compensated proportionate to their contribution to the end product, improved health and well being of the patients. And nursing is one of those rare professions that cannot be easily offshore outsourced. Indeed, you have to move the patient if you want to do this and that is often infeasible. Thus, nurses could potentially have far more clout over medicine and their own compensation packages than is currently the case. Better national organization of nurses, including the potential of national strikes, could improve working conditions for nurses, including greater respect for their work, and a fairer share of the value of health care provided. Let most people, I'm not keen on the cost of medical care increasing. However, I don't have a problem with a more equitable distribution of the value of health care. And, as far as I can tell, nurses play a central role in health care but are not treated as such.

Malaria's Parasite is Real World Trojan Horse (Science Daily)

Source: Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Posted to Science Daily: August 7, 2006
Movie Spies On Malaria Parasite's Sneaky Behavior


Malaria has been outsmarting the human immune system for centuries. Now, using real-time imaging to track malaria infections in live mice, researchers have discovered one of the parasite's sneakiest tricks—using dead liver cells to cloak and transport itself back into the bloodstream after leaving the liver.

Robert Ménard, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) international research scholar, and his postdoctoral fellow, Rogerio Amino, at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, filmed the malaria parasite as it transitioned from infecting liver cells to infecting red blood cells. During this stage of the parasite's life cycle, the classic symptoms of malaria—high fevers and chills—are triggered in people who are infected.

Ménard and Amino collaborated with Volker Heussler at the Bernhard-Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany. Their images of the parasite sneaking back into the host's bloodstream—published in advance online in Science Express on August 3, 2006 and scheduled for September 2006 publication in Science—clear up a long-standing puzzle about the malaria parasite's life cycle. The discovery could lead to new ways of treating malaria, a disease that infects 300 million people per year and kills 1 million.

“The parasite has evolved this complex structure. The best image to describe it is the Trojan horse, because it both transports the parasites and camouflages them,” said Ménard. Like the ancient Greek warriors who hid inside a giant hollow horse to gain entry to Troy, the malaria parasites wrap themselves in a structure made of liver cell membrane. This membrane cloak enables them to sneak past immune cell sentinels and return to the bloodstream.

The malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, has a complex life cycle. It passes from a mosquito's saliva to a human's blood, and then travels to the liver, where it infects and kills liver cells. After it leaves the liver, the parasite moves back into the bloodstream to infect and kill red blood cells. The rupturing of blood cells causes the worst symptoms of the infection, which can be deadly to children, pregnant women, and others with weak immune systems.

After leaving this trail of cellular death and destruction in its wake, the parasite is finally taken up again from the blood when another mosquito bites. Then it reproduces and waits for the mosquito to bite again to infect another person.

Researchers have long assumed that the form of the parasite that infects red blood cells, called a merozoite, was released from a ruptured liver cell and moved on its own back to the bloodstream. But studies in the laboratory have shown that the liver's resident macrophage immune cells happily gobble up free-moving merozoites.

“This was a paradox,” said Ménard. "We could not understand how the rate of infection could be so successful.”

Heussler's research team noticed irregular protrusions on the surface of liver cells that had been grown in a culture dish and infected with malaria. So they asked Ménard and Amino for help finding out whether liver cells in an infected animal developed the same protrusions.

Amino captured a series of images inside living mice at one-second intervals to track the parasites' journey. By using parasites labeled with a green fluorescent marker and staining the mouse's blood vessels with a red fluorescent marker, Amino was able to record microscopic images inside the animal's liver. He found that not only did the structures Heussler's group saw on the liver cells in the culture dish, called merosomes, protrude from the animal's liver cells as well, but the scientists watched as they pinched off and carried the parasite safely into the blood vessels.

Amino recalls watching the first data "movie" with Heussler. They could clearly see the merosome forming, pinching off the parasite, and traveling away with it along the blood vessel. “That is the beauty of this technique. You can really see what happens in real time—there are no gaps,” said Amino, now a professor of biochemistry at Federal University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The scientists also found that while the parasites are physically hidden inside the merosome, they further protect themselves with a biochemical cloaking device. They prevent the dying liver cell from broadcasting a chemical "death signal" that would normally tell a macrophage to ingest it.

“The parasite did not evolve this complex system for nothing,” Ménard commented. “It is probably very important that the parasite not travel free in the liver.”

If researchers could interfere with the formation of the merosome or restore the death signal, then immune system cells could stop most of the parasites before they reach the bloodstream—the place where they are most destructive.

How the parasites direct the dead liver cell to form the merosome structure and how that bag eventually bursts open in the blood are questions that remain to be answered.

But the power of using imaging to follow parasite movements inside live, infected animal hosts is clear. “It is now possible to follow in real time and quantitative terms the parasite in its host, and that is something we were only dreaming of a few years ago,” said Ménard.

Mad as Hell in China's Blogosphere -- Link

Mad as Hell in China's Blogosphere by Bruce Einhorn of Business Week

Are we Americans as forceful when the big corps treat us badly? I guess I should see if there is a Netizen movement against Target. I have never been treated as rudely by any department store, including WalMart, as when I attempted to return a defective product to Target. I think the Target store manager was either very badly trained or a sociopath. In any event, I'm never buying anything from any Target ever again. After all, it's my money.

Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a tour de force by Tommy Lee Jones and now available on DVD. This is very much an independent film, in the best sense of that phrase, and is somewhat reminiscent of Jarmusch. One of the best redemption stories I've seen. Of course, as El has told me, "you have a western soul," so maybe I'm more inclined to like a film like The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. In any event, I highly recommend it.

Mini Clip from the Play, Cotton Plant

A couple of years ago, my close friend Jens, who has added thespian to his many talents, asked me to write a play and I promised I'd do it. It took a backseat to the China book, among other things, but I keep my promises. For no particular reason, other than that I had the urge, here is a very very short clip (part of a conversation between Degenhart and his daughter, Petra) from the play in progress:

Petra: People think they know you, but they don't know anything about you.

Degenhart: Did that come to you recently as some sort of revelation?

Petra: Are you making fun of me?

Degenhart: Fun? There is nothing fun about revelations.

Petra: Okay, now I'm certain of it. You are making fun of me.


For no particular reason, other than the revelation that I can do whatever I want with this blog, I'll post a few clips from the play from time to time. Why not?

Tiny Inhaled Particles Take Easy Route From Nose To Brain -- Link

What about mold spores? Mold is already a serious health hazard and, with global warming, getting worse. (It is almost impossible to find motels, even when you pay for the higher priced versions, whose air conditioning systems are not compromised.) What is the effect of mold spores accumulating inside the human body?

Tiny Inhaled Particles Take Easy Route From Nose To Brain

Chinese Military in Outer Space? See Link

I'm on the road, but no place where wireless can't be had. Here's an interesting story on Yahoo:

China's military looks to outer space