ARIZONA SUMMER
JULY 3-10, 2012
WILDCAT TUCSON, ARIZONA
Self-publishing offers both benefits and drawbacks to aspiring authors MONSOON — 8
DailyWildcat.com
Obama’s policy hits close to home By Stephanie Casanova ARIZONA SUMMER WILDCAT
Mary Ayala, a student at the UA College of Architecture, has been taking one class every semester for the past two years. Like many undocumented students in Tucson, Ayala, whose name has been changed to maintain anonymity, has to go to school as an out-of-state student and pay out of pocket, causing her to finish her architecture degree in about 10 years instead of five.
“My senior year I received so many scholarships, full ride scholarships that I just couldn’t take because I didn’t have a social (security number),” Ayala said. On June 15, President Barack Obama announced that young people who meet certain qualifications would qualify for a two-year work permit that they could then renew every two years. This temporary administrative relief could provide thousands of young people with the opportunity to remain in the country after completing higher education.
Scholarships A-Z , an organization that provides students a list of private scholarships regardless of immigration status, decided to clarify the ramifications of Obama’s announcement by holding a press conference for the community. Parents, high school students and college students who attended the conference had questions about how procedures had changed for releasing someone who was detained, but was eligible for administrative relief. They also asked about the criteria for work-permit eligibility.
“We still don’t have all the information and like we have said, it’ll be case by case but the best thing we can do right now is be enrolled in school,” said Ayala. Ayala moved to Tucson in second grade, and has since faced many difficulties growing up undocumented in the United States. “My roots are here. My friends are here and my whole family is here,” she said. With the help of a private scholarship,
POLICY, 2
Researchers aim to create joint tissue regeneration By Isaac Cox ARIZONA SUMMER WILDCAT
New research on tissue regeneration between the UA Orthopaedic Research Laboratory and the Arizona Arthritis Center might offer a new alternative to joint replacements. The most common type of arthritis is called osteoarthritis, where the cartilage in the joints begins to break down, causing it to stiffen and lose its elasticity, according to John Szivek, the laboratory’s director. Instead of using artificial joints to repair the damage, which last 25 to 30 years with regular replacements, tissue regeneration procedures would re-grow existing tissue. The procedure begins by scanning the bone material of a joint with a high-resolution computed tomography scanner, a machine that uses X-rays to create detailed 3D images of the inner parts of the body. This machine then sends the exact material information to a 3D printer that will construct a small scaffold with the exact structure of the bone to act as carrier for the cartilage to grow upon. “These are for what is typically called Fo-
cal Defect Repair Systems, so if there’s a focal defect or damaged spot, you can use these to repair that spot,” Szivek said. Scientists would then drop cells on that scaffold to grow the surface of the cartilage. However, making sure the tissue is the right kind of tissue is the challenge, according to Szivek. “The cells (in cartilage) are highly structured in specific places and build the tissue that way,” Szivek said. “So one of the things we’ve been looking at is how we can align the cells in a specific pattern.” Szivek discovered that by adding a container to the scaffold, they could align the strands of the cells in one direction using the adult stem cells found in fat tissue. “The nice thing about adult stem cells is there are lots of them found in fat, they’re easy to harvest, you can collect them pretty easily, they don’t mind growing in flat culture and we can convert them to cartilage cells reasonably easy,” Szivek said. “If we’re happy to wait, we can just drop them into the cartilage itself and all the other cartilage cells will convince them to become cartilage
TISSUE, 3
KYLE WASSON / ARIZONA SUMMER WILDCAT
John Szivek, director of the Orthopaedic Research Laboratory at the UA, talks about his research, which aims to replace depleted cartilage in joints throughout the body.