Cutting-edge technology optimizes cancer therapy with nanomedicine drug combinations

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UCLA bioengineers develop platform that offers personalized approach to treatment

In greater than 90 percent of cases in which treatment for metastatic cancer fails, the reason is that the cancer is resistant to the drugs being used. To treat drug-resistant tumors, doctors typically use multiple drugs simultaneously, a practice called combination therapy. And one of their greatest challenges is determining which ratio and combination -- from the large number of medications available -- is best for each individual patient.

Dr. Dean Ho, a professor of oral biology and medicine at the UCLA School of Dentistry, and Dr. Chih-Ming Ho, a professor of mechanical engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, have developed a revolutionary approach that brings together traditional drugs and nanotechnology-enhanced medications to create safer and more effective treatments. Their results are published in the peer-reviewed journal ACS Nano.

Chih-Ming Ho, the paper's co-corresponding author, and his team have developed a powerful new tool to address drug resistance and dosing challenges in cancer patients. The tool, Feedback System Control.II, or FSC.II, considers drug efficacy tests and analyzes the physical traits of cells and other biological systems to create personalized "maps" that show the most effective and safest drug-dose combinations.

Currently, doctors use people's genetic information to identify the best possible combination therapies, which can make treatment difficult or impossible when the genes in the cancer cells mutate. The new technique does not rely on genetic information, which makes it possible to quickly modify treatments when mutations arise: the drug that no longer functions can be replaced, and FSC.II can immediately recommend a new combination.

"Drug combinations are conventionally designed using dose escalation," said Dean Ho, a co-corresponding author of the study and the co-director of the Jane and Jerry Weintraub Center for Reconstructive Biotechnology at the School of Dentistry. "Until now, there hasn't been a systematic way to even know where the optimal drug combination could be found, and the possible drug-dose combinations are nearly infinite. FSC.II circumvents all of these issues and identifies the best treatment strategy."

The researchers demonstrated that combinations identified by FSC.II could treat multiple lines of breast cancer that had varying levels of drug resistance. They evaluated the commonly used cancer drugs doxorubicin, mitoxantrone, bleomycin and paclitaxel, all of which can be rendered ineffective when cancer cells eject them before they have had a chance to function.

The researchers also studied the use of nanodiamonds to make combination treatments even more effective. Nanodiamonds -- byproducts of conventional mining and refining operations -- have versatile characteristics that allow drugs to be tightly bound to their surface, making it much harder for cancer cells to eliminate them and allowing toxic drugs to be administered over a longer period of time.

The use of nanodiamonds to treat cancer was pioneered by Dean Ho, a professor of bioengineering and member of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the California NanoSystems Institute.

"This study has the capacity to turn drug development, nano or non-nano, upside-down," he said. "Even though FSC.II now enables us to rapidly identify optimized drug combinations, it's not just about the speed of discovering new combinations. It's the systematic way that we can control and optimize different therapeutic outcomes to design the most effective medicines possible."

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Cutting-edge technology optimizes cancer therapy with nanomedicine drug combinations

Study finds short-term psychological therapy reduces suicide attempts in at-risk soldiers

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Research group included University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio investigators

IMAGE:Alan Peterson Ph.D., from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, was co-PI on a study showing that at-risk soldiers receiving short-term cognitive-behavioral therapy were 60... view more

Credit: University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio

SAN ANTONIO (Feb. 13, 2015) - Short-term cognitive behavioral therapy dramatically reduces suicide attempts among at-risk military personnel, according to findings from a research study that included investigators from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

The two-year study, funded by the Army's Military Operational Medicine Research Program, was conducted at Fort Carson, Colo. It involved 152 active-duty soldiers who had either attempted suicide or had been determined to be at high risk for suicide, and evaluated the effectiveness of a brief cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in preventing future suicide attempts.

The study found that soldiers receiving CBT were 60 percent less likely to make a suicide attempt during the 24-month follow-up than those receiving standard treatment. The results were published online Friday, Feb. 13, by The American Journal of Psychiatry. The article is available online at http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/.

The findings are particularly encouraging, given that rates of active-duty service members receiving psychiatric diagnoses increased by more than 60 percent during a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rates of suicides and suicide attempts rose in comparable numbers.

"The significant increase in military suicides over the past decade is a national tragedy," said Alan Peterson, Ph.D., a co-investigator on the study who is a professor of psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the UT Health Science Center San Antonio and director of the military-focused STRONG STAR Consortium. "The Department of Defense has responded by investing significant resources into military suicide research, and the findings from this study may be the most important and most hopeful to date. To see a 60 percent reduction in suicide attempts among at-risk active-duty soldiers after a brief intervention is truly exciting," Dr. Peterson said.

Other UT Health Science Center investigators from the STRONG STAR Consortium included Stacey Young-McCaughan, RN, Ph.D., and Jim Mintz, Ph.D. STRONG STAR, an international research group led by the Health Science Center, supported this study as part of its larger effort to develop and test the best diagnoses, preventions and treatments for combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder and related conditions.

M. David Rudd, Ph.D., president of the University of Memphis, and Craig Bryan, Psy.D., a clinical psychologist at the University of Utah and executive director of the National Center for Veterans Studies, led the study.

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Study finds short-term psychological therapy reduces suicide attempts in at-risk soldiers

Magnolia ISD students advance to State Science Fair

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Magnolia ISD students competed in the regional Science Engineering Fair of Houston this past weekend with several students advancing to the State Science Fair in San Antonio March 26-29, 2015.

The students who qualified for State are:

Grace Gustin from Magnolia Junior High - 2nd Place in Behavioral Science Category

Katherine Hinchley and Sophia Ebel from Magnolia Junior High - 3rd Place Team Engineering Category

Breland McDaniel from Bear Branch Junior High - 3rd Place in Biochemistry Category

Molly Davis from Bear Branch Junior High - 1st Place in Biochemistry Category

Several students also received notable awards at the regional fair:

Grace Smith from Magnolia Junior High - Special Award from Jacobs Technology

Nicholas Gonzaga from Magnolia Junior High - Special Award from Jacobs Technology

Gloria McConnell from Magnolia High School - 3rd Place in Medicine/Health Category and Special Award from The Society of Women Engineers

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Magnolia ISD students advance to State Science Fair

Meeting: Nutrition and the Science of Disease Prevention: A Systems Approach to Support Metabolic Health

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MEDIA ALERT

WHAT: Nutrition and the Science of Disease Prevention: A Systems Approach to Support Metabolic Health

WHEN: Thursday, April 16, 2015, 8:30 AM - 7:00 PM

WHERE: The New York Academy of Sciences NYC

PRESENTED BY: The Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science at the New York Academy of Sciences

DESCRIPTION: How can we leverage progress in nutritional science, genetics, computer science and behavioral economics to address the challenge of non-communicable disease? Join us for this one-day conference that will highlight the connection between nutrition and the complex science of preventing disease. This forum will focus on promotion of optimal metabolic health, building on input from several complementary disciplines, with ample time for discussion interaction and networking. Speakers will discuss the basic science of optimal metabolic health with a focus on the microbiome and gene-diet interactions; epidemiological evidence in nutrition to define better targets and better interventions; and how nutrition, from pharma to lifestyle, can build on systems science to address complex issues.

MORE INFORMATION AND THE CONFERENCE AGENDA: http://www.nyas.org/PreventionScience

PRESS REGISTRATION: Contact Diana Friedman at dfriedman@nyas.org or 212-298-8645

###

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

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Meeting: Nutrition and the Science of Disease Prevention: A Systems Approach to Support Metabolic Health

New UTHealth therapy targets PTSD, substance use disorders

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IMAGE:Anka Vujanovich, Ph.D., is studying a combined behavioral therapy for PTSD and substance use disorder. view more

Credit: UTHealth

HOUSTON - (March 2, 2015) - A new cognitive behavioral therapy designed to treat both post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorders is the focus of research at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) Medical School.

The therapy, called Treatment of Integrated Post-traumatic Stress and Substance Use (TIPSS), was developed by Anka Vujanovic, Ph.D., who leads the Trauma and Addiction Research Program at the UTHealth Center for Neurobehavioral Research on Addiction in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

PTSD results from exposure to a traumatic event, defined as actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence against self or others. It is associated with significant functional impairment and negative health outcomes.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, symptoms include reliving the trauma over and over, bad dreams and frightening thoughts. People with PTSD may have feelings of strong guilt, depression or worry and they may lose interest in activities that were enjoyable in the past. They also may be easily startled, feel tense, have trouble sleeping and/or have angry outbursts.

Previous research has indicated that PTSD carries a substantially elevated risk for substance use disorders and it has been documented as a significant risk factor for worse substance abuse treatment outcomes.

"Treatment for PTSD has historically been done separately from treatment for substance use disorders," said Vujanovic, UTHealth assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. "We are testing an evidence-based integrated treatment designed to target both in the same therapy with the goal of improving outcomes." To do so, Vujanovic and colleagues are comparing TIPSS to standard cognitive-behavioral treatment for substance use disorders.

Both types of treatment focus on noticing thoughts and feelings and how they affect drug use and other behaviors. TIPSS also involves talking about PTSD symptoms, building distress tolerance skills, reflecting on the impact of the trauma and substance abuse and challenging problematic thinking patterns related to the trauma and the substance abuse.

The study is funded by a $412,000 Career Development Award grant from the National Institutes of Health/UTHealth Clinical and Translational Sciences (KL2TR000370-07).

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New UTHealth therapy targets PTSD, substance use disorders

U.S. atheist blogger killed in stabbing attack in Bangladesh

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Assailants hacked to death an American secular writer and blogger of Bangladeshi origin and seriously wounded his wife outside a book fair in Dhaka, the South Asian nations capital, officials said Friday.

Avijit Roy, 42, a champion of liberalism and outspoken critic of Islamists, was repeatedly stabbed Thursday night by at least two attackers at the Dhaka University campus. His wife, Rafida Ahmed Bonya, was hospitalized with multiple wounds.

An Islamist group calling itself Ansar Bangla-7 claimed responsibility for the attack in a series of Twitter postings, saying Roy was a target for more than 3/4 years for his writings that it characterized as being critical of Islam. The groups Twitter account was later disabled.

No immediate arrests were made, police said.

Roy, who had traveled from his home in the Atlanta area to Dhaka for a visit two weeks ago, was the latest secular writer to come under attack by Islamists in Bangladesh. A software engineer by profession, Roy was known for advocating human rights and the rights of atheists, which had put him in the cross-hairs of extremist groups in the conservative Muslim nation.

The author of several books and founder of the website Mukto-mona, which means free mind in Bengali, Roy was the target of frequent death threats, his friends said.

Sirajul Islam, the officer in charge at the Shahbag police station, where Roys father reported the attack, said two bloodstained butcher knives and a shoulder bag were recovered at the scene. Handles of the butcher knives were wrapped in paper, he said.

The attack occurred on a sidewalk outside the Teachers-Students Center on the university campus about 9 p.m., authorities said. At least two people attacked Roy from behind, slashing his head. They attacked his wife when she tried to save him. Bonya, 40, suffered head wounds and lost a finger, Islam said.

Roy and Bonya were taken to Dhaka Medical College Hospital, where Roy died about 10:20 p.m., officials said. Bonya, a writer and blogger, was listed in serious condition.

Witnesses said police officers and others were nearby when the attack occurred but did not attempt to intervene, despite Bonyas screams for help.

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U.S. atheist blogger killed in stabbing attack in Bangladesh

U.S. blogger critical of Muslim extremists fatally stabbed in Bangladesh

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Assailants hacked to death an American secular writer and blogger of Bangladeshi origin and seriously wounded his wife outside a book fair in Dhaka, the South Asian nations capital, officials said Friday.

Avijit Roy, 42, a champion of liberalism and outspoken critic of Islamists, was repeatedly stabbed Thursday night by at least two attackers at the Dhaka University campus. His wife, Rafida Ahmed Bonya, was hospitalized with multiple wounds.

An Islamist group calling itself Ansar Bangla-7 claimed responsibility for the attack in a series of Twitter postings, saying Roy was a target for more than 3/4 years for his writings that it characterized as being critical of Islam. The groups Twitter account was later disabled.

No immediate arrests were made, police said.

Roy, who had traveled from his home in the Atlanta area to Dhaka for a visit two weeks ago, was the latest secular writer to come under attack by Islamists in Bangladesh. A software engineer by profession, Roy was known for advocating human rights and the rights of atheists, which had put him in the cross-hairs of extremist groups in the conservative Muslim nation.

The author of several books and founder of the website Mukto-mona, which means free mind in Bengali, Roy was the target of frequent death threats, his friends said.

Sirajul Islam, the officer in charge at the Shahbag police station, where Roys father reported the attack, said two bloodstained butcher knives and a shoulder bag were recovered at the scene. Handles of the butcher knives were wrapped in paper, he said.

The attack occurred on a sidewalk outside the Teachers-Students Center on the university campus about 9 p.m., authorities said. At least two people attacked Roy from behind, slashing his head. They attacked his wife when she tried to save him. Bonya, 40, suffered head wounds and lost a finger, Islam said.

Roy and Bonya were taken to Dhaka Medical College Hospital, where Roy died about 10:20 p.m., officials said. Bonya, a writer and blogger, was listed in serious condition.

Witnesses said police officers and others were nearby when the attack occurred but did not attempt to intervene, despite Bonyas screams for help.

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U.S. blogger critical of Muslim extremists fatally stabbed in Bangladesh

In the Memory Ward

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Aby Warburg (second from left) was the spirit behind the iconographic studies that dominated much of twentieth-century art history. Credit Courtesy the Warburg Institute

At first, the library of the Warburg Institute, in London, seems and smells like any other university library: four floors of fluorescent lights and steel shelves, with the damp, weedy aroma of aging books everywhere, and sudden apparitions of graduate students wearing that look, at once brightly keen and infinitely discouraged, eternally shared by graduate students, whether the old kind, with sude elbow patches, or the new kind, with many piercings.

Only as the visitor begins to study the collections does the oddity of the place appear. In the range-finder plates mounted on the shelves, where in a normal library one would expect to see Spanish Literature, Sixteenth Century or Biography, American: E663-664, there are, instead, signs pointing toward Magic Mirrors and Amulets and The Evil Eye. Long shelves of original medieval astrology hug texts on modern astronomy. The section on Modern Philosophy includes volume after volume of Nietzsche and half a shelf of Hume. The open stacksexceptional in any gathering of irreplaceable booksare, in the European scheme of things, almost unknown. In the Bibliothque Nationale, in Paris, the aim seems to be to keep as many books as possible safely out of the hands of people who might want to read them. In the Warburg Library, the books are available to be thumbed through at will.

History is here, ancient and local. An old edition of Epictetus, opened, turns out to bear the bookplate, complete with glaring owl, of E. H. Gombrich, perhaps the most important of modern art historians, who directed the Warburg Institute in its high period, in the nineteen-sixties. Beside each elevator bank, a chart displaying, in capital letters, the librarys curious organization helps guide the bewildered student: FIRST FLOOR: IMAGE, SECOND FLOOR: WORD, up to FOURTH FLOOR: ACTION-orientation, with Action comprising Cultural and Political History, and orientation Magic and Science. Mounted in the stairwells are uncanny black-and-white photographic collages of a single female typea woman dancing in flowing draperythat is seen in many forms, from classical friezes to Renaissance painting.

It is a library like no other in Europein its cross-disciplinary reference, its peculiarities, its originality, its strange depths and unexpected shallows. Magic and science, evil eyes and saints lives: these things repose side by side in a labyrinth of imagery and icons and memory. Dan Browns hero Robert Langdon supposedly teaches symbology at Harvard. There is no such field, but if there were, and if Professor Langdon wanted to study it before making love to mysterious Frenchwomen and nimbly avoiding Opus Dei hit men, this is where he would come to study.

Begun at the start of the last century, in Hamburg, by Aby Warburg, a wealthy bankers son, the Warburg Library has been often expanded, but the original vision has never really been altered. It is a vast and expensive institution, devoted to a system of ideas that, however fascinating, are also in some dated ways faddish, and in some small ways foolish. Warburg, who died in 1929, spent part of his adult life in and out of mental hospitalsat one point, he lived in fear that he was being daily served human flesh. Yet he was the spirit behind the iconographic studies that dominated art history for most of the second half of the twentieth centurythe man who reoriented the scholarly study of art from a discipline devoted essentially to saying who had painted what pictures when to one asking what all the little weird bits and pieces within the pictures might have meant in their time.

In the past several years, the Warburgs future has been fiercely contested. It is in some senses a small and parochial struggle, right out of Trollopes Barchester novels, and in others about something very bigabout the future of private visions within public institutions, about what memory is and what we owe it, about how to tell when an original vision has become merely an eccentric one. It is the tale that has been told, in another key, about moving the Barnes Foundation from Merion to Philadelphia, and about expanding the Frick Collection, in New York. The question is what we owe the pasts past, what we owe the institutions that have shaped our view of how history happened, when contemporary history is happening to them.

The fight over the future of the Warburg Institute came to a climax in the past few months, but it started seven years ago, when the Warburg Institute and then the University of London began to seek legal counsel in order to clarify the terms of the trust deed that, in 1944, as the Second World War raged, had brought the institute into the university. Last year, the university initiated a lawsuit, thinking to converge the Warburgs books into its larger library system, and to continue charging the Warburg a very large fee for the use of its building. Warburg-shaped scholars sought to rally the academic community in the pages of journals and on humanities Listservs. If the universitys plans succeed, the Princeton historian Anthony Grafton and the Harvard art historian Jeffrey Hamburger wrote, in The New York Review of Books, the institute will have to abandon Warburgs fundamental principles, lose control of its own books and periodicals (many of them acquired by gift or by the expenditure of the institutes endowments), and shed, over time, the distinguished staff of scholars and scholar-librarians who train its students and continue to shape its holdings.... A center of European culture and a repository of the Western tradition that escaped Hitler and survived the Blitz may finally be destroyed by British bean counters.

After smoldering within academia, the affair was ignited in public by a petition launched by an American Ph.D. student at University College London named Brooke Palmieri, a Warburg visitor who had come to London first to work in the rare-book trade, then to write a thesis on the pre-Pennsylvania Quakers. I started the petition on Change.org last July, she said recently, in that special lilting drawl of East Coast Americans long resident in London. And within a couple of months it was just shy of twenty-five thousand signatures. It was an astonishing number for a library. But the Warburg has an amazingly vibrant intellectual history. I think whats probably most interesting to me is that it runs on what they call the law of the good neighborits not based on what librarians alphabetically catalogue. Instead, its catalogued according to themes. The methodology of serendipity is what its all about, and the methodology of serendipity is responsible for most great ideas.

Visiting London last fall, I found that while many people were exercised about the future of the Warburg, and had much to say about the approaching judgment, what they offered was more complicated than a simple picture of philistine university administrators assaulting virtuous scholars. Some people had their mouths firmly shut: those within the institute by the pending decision; the historian Lisa Jardine, who is Palmieris thesis adviser, and who had at first been publicly passionate in protest, by the sudden possibility that she might, in an emergency, be called on to run the Warburg if it lost the case and had to rebuild.

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In the Memory Ward

Is there any case for religion? Christianity, Islam, atheism and my search for balance and truth

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And yet, of course, there is the other side to the story. The tales of love and compassion, of giving and of sacrifice, of suffering even unto death, all done genuinely by Christians in the name of their Lord. Since we started the downside in England, let us return there for the upside. The earliest antislavery protests started in the New World in the late seventeenth century.

Soon they spread to England, and like many of the American protesters, the earliest antislavery campaigners were members of the Religious Society of Friends, Quakers. The first formal movement was the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded in London in 1787. Nine of the twelve founding members were Quakers, the others Anglicans. As is well known, certainly to every schoolchild in Britain, parliamentary leadership was taken over by William Wilberforce (17591833), a man who had undergone an extreme conversion to evangelical Christianity and whose whole life was dedicated to what he thought was the directive of his faith. A member of the British parliament, he began introducing bills for the abolition of the slave trade, explicitly basing his actions on his Christian commitment. Never, never will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name, released ourselves from the load of guilt, under which we at present labour, and extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic, of which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonou to this country (Speech before the House of Commons, April 18, 1791, in Clarkson 2010, 448). It took forty years for slavery to be abolished through the British Empire, and final success was only achieved days after the death of Wilberforce. But without the efforts of these deeply committed Christians, the abolition of slavery in the empire would not have occurred as soon (Hochschild 2006).

Wilberforce and his fellow campaignerswho included the Wedgwood family of pottery fame (to which the mother and wife of Charles Darwin belonged)could be dreadful prigs at times, as well as often showing a remarkable lack of interest in the well-being of their own native working population (Desmond and Moore 2009). Yet they were not alone in their Christian-driven urges to reform. Elizabeth Fry (17801845), another Quaker, labored incessantly for the betterment of the lives and well-being of women in prison. She also founded shelters for the homeless and started a training school for nurses (some of whom were to go to the Crimea with Florence Nightingale). Faced with criticism for her efforts as a womana role that stemmed naturally from the equality of the sexes in Quakerismshe found a formidable ally late in life in her new monarch, Victoria. The Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (who so hated German theology) was a notable evangelical and social reformer, one who started by working for the reformation of how the mentally disabled were treated and then went on to play a major role in the improvement of the conditions of workers, especially children, in factories and related occupations. The Mines and Colliers Act of 1842 finally banned women and children from going down the mines, and boys under ten years old were also barred. It took another thirty years before Shaftesbury was able to ensure the elimination of boy chimney sweeps (like Tom in Charles Kingsleys Water Babies), a particularly vile occupation, dangerous in itselfa popular way of getting the wretches to move on was to light a fire under themand with horrible effects later in life, notably scrotal cancer.

Do we find parallels, stories of light and goodness in the other areas I showed the dark and evil side to religion? Of course we do. The story of Pastor Martin Niemller (18921984) is well known (Evans 2005). A First World War hero, he was a sailor in the U-boats, and he followed his father in becoming a Lutheran pastor. From a conservative background, initially he welcomed the rise of the Nazis, but soon he fell afoul of them over the Aryan policies, becoming one of the founders of the Confessing Church. For his outspoken opposition, he spent much of the Third Reich in concentration camps, Sachsenhausen and Dachau. He is best known for his famous statement that he and his fellows had stood aside and let the forces of evil have their waythey came for the communists, the trade unionists, the Jews, the Jehovahs Witnesses, the incurablesand then? Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me. Pastor Dietrich Bonhffer (19061945) is an even greater Christian hero. Another founding member of the Confessing Church, he returned from abroad to work alongside his fellow Christians. Imprisoned by the Nazis, he died strangled by piano wire for his involvement in plots against Hitler. Always driven forward by his faith, Bonhffer explicitly saw the imitation of Christ here on earth as our first, foremost, and indeed only obligation. Deeply influenced by the Pietism movement in German thought and tradition, he argued that only by engaging as Christians within the world can we show our true allegiance to our savior. Among those greatly influenced by Bonhffer was Martin Luther King, Jr. And finally, if you want a third personor groupthere is the story almost too painful to recount of Sophie Scholl (19211943) and the White Rose group (Newborn and Dumbach 2007). A small band of ChristiansSophie was Lutheran but much moved by Catholic writing and preachingthey distributed antiwar pamphlets at the University of Munich in 1942 and 1943. Inevitably, they were discovered, condemned to death, and executed. As she walked to the guillotine, her last words were: How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action? (Hanser 1979).

And so to the Catholic Church. Does one talk of Vincent de Paul (15811660), who founded charities, who built hospitals, who ransomed galley slaves from the Arabs? Does one mention the great teaching orders, most notably the Jesuits, who founded no less than twenty-eight universities and colleges in America, including Fordham, Georgetown, and Gonzaga? Do not forget Dorothy Day (18971980), devout Catholic convert, who served the poor and homeless during the Depression. Or does one speak of Maximillian Kolbe (18941941), the Franciscan friar who calmly took the place of a condemned prisoner and died in Auschwitz? Take the Christian Brothers. An Irish congregation, they have spread across the world, founding schools in all of the many countries in which they find themselves. In Canada, rightly, for the abuses that they perpetrated at an orphanage in Newfoundland, they have a dreadful reputation. (All too typically, the archdiocese had been aware of what was happening and simply covered things up until they exploded into the public domain.) Put this against the story of a man I am proud to call my friend, Michael Matthews (b. 1946), who virtually single-handedly has reformed science education by bringing to bear the insights of the history and philosophy of science. He was raised by a single mother in Sydney, Australia, and when he was on the verge of adolescence, the headmaster of the local Christian Brothers school announced that (without cost) Michael would be enrolled as a pupil the next Monday. And he was, and his life was launchedthrough the dedication of men for whom the life of a Christian was reason enough. No doubt telling this story will embarrass Michael, but I do so to deflect interest in my own parallel story involving the kindness of members of the Religious Society of Friends. My education was paid for by Kit Kat bars, produced by the Quaker philanthropists, the Rowntree family.

Does the Good Outweigh the Bad?

Christians will not be surprised by any of this, the bad and the good. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate (Romans 7: 15). We are made in the image of God, but we are deeply tainted by sin. But how are we to evaluate things? Does the good outweigh the bad, or is it the other way? Richard Dawkins will say that the bad far outweighs the good. Many Christians (not all) will say the good outweighs the bad. They will point out also that we are not just dealing with morality, but with culture generally, and this includes the arts. Could one imagine a world without the cathedral at Chartres, without a Raphael Madonna (or for that matter without a Grunewald Crucifixion), without the Bach Passions? Dawkins responds that there is no need of religion for any of this: the B Minor Mass, the Matthew Passion, these happen to be on a religious theme, but they might as well not be. Theyre beautiful music on a great poetic theme, but we could still go on enjoying them without believing in any of that supernatural rubbish (this was a series of talks and debates organized by the Science Network in association with the Crick-Jacobs Center at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, November 57, 2006). I confess that I am not entirely certain about this, although admittedly a purely secular and worthwhile culture is possible. My favorite opera is Mozarts Cosi Fan Tutte, which is about as non-Christian and Enlightenment cynical as it is possible to imagine. I find Parsifal very tedious, and the quasi-Christian mysticism is a major part of what makes it so.

The simple fact is that one is asking an impossible and unanswerable question. What kind of calculus is one to use to weigh Bloody Mary killing three hundred Protestants against the sacrifice of Sophie Scholl in Munich in 1943? Somehow, a simple body count seems highly inappropriate. How does one measure those going to their death absolutely secure in their belief in the hereafter and of Gods love and praise against someone who dies worried and scared and not completely sure, or at least was that way until the last momentsomeone like Blanche in Poulencs Dialogues of the Carmelites? For that matter, how do you measure the death of Sophie on the guillotine against the death of Jesus on the cross? Alvin Plantinga is convinced that the latter is overwhelmingly the greatest act of moral goodness ever. I am not so sure. New Atheists will argue that such calculations are irrelevant. As the example of one child suffering is argument enough against the existence of the Christian God, so the sexual abuse of one child is argument enough against the value of religion. The evils of religion are just too awful, and religion must be abandoned. This is the morally right thing to do. Others, not necessarily all Christians, will argue that evil things are going to happen whatever the state of societythink of what happened in the atheistic societies of Russia and Chinaand that perhaps on balance religion ameliorates this. The aim is not to eliminate religion but to improve it.

What about Islam?

Are we not missing the elephant in the room? The focus in this book is the Christian faith. Agree if you must that on the evil question it is a draw, or at least that there are arguments for and arguments against. But Christianity is not the only religious faith, and no contemporary discussion of whether religion is a bad thing would be complete without at least a brief look at the religion of Islam. Since the attack on the World Trade Centers towers, 9/11, a major theme running through the writings of those opposed to religion is that Islam presents a special and particular danger. So insistent is this theme that critics have suggested that a form of Islamophobia is at work, because surely no religion could be this bad, and, even if it is, the skimpy research (to be generous) of the atheists precludes them from having an opinion.

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Is there any case for religion? Christianity, Islam, atheism and my search for balance and truth

Private Mars One colony project cuts applicant pool to 100 volunteers

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By Mike Wall

This 1999 Hubble telescope image shows Mars when Mars was 54 million miles from Earth.(REUTERS/NASA/Handout)

One hundred people are still in the running to become humanity's first Mars explorers.

The Netherlands-based nonprofit Mars One, which aims to land four pioneers on the Red Planet in 2025 as the vanguard of a permanent colony, has whittled its pool of astronaut candidates down to 100, organization representatives announced Monday Feb. 16.

More than 202,000 people applied to become Red Planet explorers after Mars One opened the selection process in April 2013. The latest cut came after Mars One medical director Norbert Kraft interviewed the 660 candidates who had survived several previous rounds of culling. [Images of Mars One's Red Planet Colony Project]

"The large cut in candidates is an important step towards finding out who has the right stuff to go to Mars," Mars One co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp said in a statement. "These aspiring Martians provide the world with a glimpse into who the modern day explorers will be."

The remaining pool consists of 50 men and 50 women who range in age from 19 to 60, Mars One representatives said. Thirty-nine come from the Americas (including 33 from the United States), 31 from Europe, 16 from Asia, seven from Africa and seven from Australia.

The remaining candidates will next participate in group challenges, to demonstrate their ability and willingness to deal with the rigors of Mars life. After another round of cuts, the finalists will be divided into four-person teams, which will train in a simulated Red Planet outpost.

Eventually, Mars One intends to select 24 astronauts (six four-person teams), who will become full-time employees of the organization and prepare for the Mars colonization mission.

"Being one of the best individual candidates does not automatically make you the greatest team player, so I look forward to seeing how the candidates progress and work together in the upcoming challenges," Kraft said.

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Private Mars One colony project cuts applicant pool to 100 volunteers

NATO Black Sea Drills: NATO steps up presence in east Europe amid Russia intervention in Ukraine – Video

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NATO Black Sea Drills: NATO steps up presence in east Europe amid Russia intervention in Ukraine
A NATO flotilla is conducting training n the Black sea with exercises which include anti-air and anti-submarine warfare exercises, as well as boat attacks an...

By: UKRAINE TODAY

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NATO Black Sea Drills: NATO steps up presence in east Europe amid Russia intervention in Ukraine - Video