DAILY LOBO new mexico
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wednesday
October 27, 2010
The Independent Voice of UNM since 1895
Slated buildings to cost millions
SMASHING PUMPKINS
Committee discusssed construction of care center, medical building renovations by Andrew Lyman alyman@unm.edu
Daniel Hulsbos / Daily Lobo Student Felicia Alexander stands with a baseball bat outside the SUB on Tuesday. Her group, Nourish International, held a bake sale and pumpkin-smashing event to raise money for sustainable organic agriculture in Nicaragua and Guatemala.
UNM receives research funding by Ruben Hamming-Green rhamminggreen@gmail.com
The American Cancer Society gave a UNM researcher $360,000 in hopes of bringing fresh blood to the fight against cancer. The society awarded $360,000 in research funds to Michelle Ozbun, UNM cancer biologist and virologist, over the next three years. The funds will go toward budding researchers at the University, with the one stipulation that research be done on cancer. John Weisgerber, a spokesman for the ACS, said it received about 2,000 grant applications. After review, 94 received grant money. “The neat thing about the institutional research grant which (Ozbun) is going to oversee is that it provides seed money to new cancer researchers,” he said. “We try to fund some of the best and brightest in the country and help get their research careers off the ground.” Weisgerber said the ACS gave grants to 44 people who won Nobel Prizes.
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Ozbun, who has a doctorate in molecular virology, previously did research on the human papilloma virus and cervical cancer. She said the grant money will go toward researchers in need of experience. “The grant is to give to junior faculty ... who are working on a cancerrelated project and who have not obtained national funding,” Ozbun said. “These little grants are to help people get more preliminary data so they can compete better for the really large national grants.” Ozbun said the grant money will fund about four $30,000 research projects per year. Applicants generally come from different academic departments. “We have a lot of really cool things going on between the college of engineering and the School of Medicine and the department of physics,” Ozbun said. “It’s pretty cross-disciplinary.” UNM has received the Institutional Research Grant from the ACS continuously since 1992. This latest grant will take effect on Jan. 1 and continue through 2013. “It helps in the success of new faculty members,” Ozbun said. “We have a lot of really innovative young investigators, and that’s really what the ACS likes to do. It likes to fund people before they get their big break.”
DL
National treasures lost, US gov says by Brett Zongker Associated Press
WASHINGTON — An audit prompted in part by the loss of the Wright Brothers’ original patent and maps for atomic bomb missions in Japan finds some of the nation’s prized historical documents are in danger of being lost for good. Nearly 80 percent of U.S. government agencies are at risk of illegally destroying public records and the National Archives is backlogged with hefty volumes of records needing preservation care, the audit by the Government Accountability Office found. The report by the watchdog arm of Congress, completed this month after a year’s work and obtained by The Associated Press, also found many U.S. agencies do not follow proper procedures for disposing of public records. Officials at the National Archives, which houses the Declaration of
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Independence, the U.S. Constitution and other treasured documents at its Washington rotunda, had no immediate comment Tuesday on the findings. The report comes more than a year after news reports of key items missing at the nation’s record-keeping agency. Some of the items have been missing for decades but their absence only became widely known in recent years. The patent file for the Wright Brothers flying machine was last seen in 1980 after passing around multiple Archives offices, the Patents and Trademarks Office and the National Air and Space Museum. As for maps for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, military representatives checked them out in 1962, and they’ve been missing ever since. The GAO report did not specifically mention those or other examples of missing items including Civil War telegrams from Abraham Lincoln, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin patent and some NASA photographs on the moon. A second GAO report obtained by the AP details “significant weaknesses” in the Archives’ security. The Oct. 21 report refers to a lost computer hard drive from the
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The Board of Regents’ Finance and Facilities Committee approved $400 million worth of investments, construction and repairs Tuesday. Andrew Cullen, associate vice president of Office of Planning Budget and Analysis, asked the committee to continue to allow McDonnell Investment Managment discretion to handle the University’s finances. He said UNM avoided losing money in an unstable market because of the investment firm. “We’ve avoided a lot of pitfalls,” Cullen said. UNM Vice President David Harris said having an outside investment company is the safest route. The committee also discussed construction of the Children’s Ambulatory Care Center, along with other construction projects and repairs. The Center was approved and will provide general pediatric services. It will be located north of the Bill and Barbara Richardson Pavilion and will cost $40 million, UNM Budget Officer Vahid Staples said. The approved items will go before the Board of Regents at its next meeting. “Twelve million dollars would come from 2010’s General Obligation fund, and the rest would come from UNMH’s capital,” Staples said. Staples said the building would replace an existing parking lot, and a parking plan would have to be addressed in the future. The committee also approved the construction of the Facility for Advanced Cell Engineering, which costs about $2 million, Staples said. The facility would be used for research in cell studies and organ transplants, and the project would take about 400 square feet in the Basic Medical Sciences Building’s existing space, Staples said. “The facility would be used to study human disease and transplant rejections,” Staples said. The committee also approved $1.9 million in renovations for the Clinical and Translational Science Center and the Basic Medical Sciences center.
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