Tuesday, September 10, 2013

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w w w .w e sterngazette .c a • @uw ogaze tt e

Much love for One Love >> pg. 4

thegazette Still moving in since 1906

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

today high 34 low 21

tomorrow high 34 low 20

canada’s only Daily Student Newspaper • founded 1906

Volume 107, issue 4

Hadfield Christens new Ivey building Jeremiah Rodriguez News Editor After six years of construction, the new Richard Ivey building officially swung its doors open with fanfare, confetti and Canada’s worldrenowned astronaut, Commander Chris Hadfield. A sea of Ivey business students, dignitaries, government officials and school donors all decked out in white Ivey gear, waving flags, welcomed the keynote speaker who touched down at Western’s Alumni Hall yesterday. Hadfield spoke about leadership and determination to a packed room as he rehashed stories of humble beginnings in Sarnia, playing astronaut in a Quaker’s cereal box, to getting his wings at London Airport to later becoming a commander and eventual leader at the International Space Station. “Whether you’re tasked with a group of people for a one hour task, or something much greater like leaders in Ivey’s 90-year history have demonstrated — leadership means guiding a team with complete confidence in their skills,” Hadfield said. When prompted about what he thought about as his rocket blasted off from Kazakhstan, Hadfield said he wasn’t worried because he had already planned for everything more than once as “Great leaders plan for the worst case scenario.”

“Here at Ivey, we emphasize leadership and we try and encourage that in as many forms as we can. Through Hadfield’s innovation through his Twitter posts and YouTube videos, he was able to reach so many around the world,” said Andrew Rankin, an Ivey School student who helped spur the campaign to get Hadfield to Western. “It’s not the traditional leadership you’d think of, but his actions and his words have been inspiring to all of us,” Rankin said. The communications team at Ivey along with four MBA students sent Hadfield a video petitioning Canada’s famous spacewalker to christen their new school. The Western spirit seems to have overwhelmed Hadfield and he said, “there was no where else [he] could choose.” The Western university marching band accompanied Hadfield as he led a procession across campus to the new building where dignitaries including outgoing dean of Ivey Carol Stephenson, and 93-year old Richard Ivey himself, were in attendance. The 240,000 square foot building broke ground back in 2009 after architecture firm Hariri Pontarini beat off other firms in a contest vying for the project. “If we needed a world class business school we need a world class building which represents who we

Bill Wang GAZETTE

IVEY, THE FINAL FRONTIER. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield addresses the audience at the inauguration of the new Richard Ivey Building, which will house the school of business.

are at Ivey,” Stephenson said. “We were out of space before. We knew with the current projected growth in our program back in 2006, we needed it. We wondered if we should expand down the hill, but the more we looked at it — we realized we needed a new building,”

Stephenson added. The building hosts a 640 seat auditorium, 20 classrooms, 52 breakout rooms and the newly minted C.B. Johnson Library. With its green building design and construction, the building gained Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design

Gold certificate status. The project cost $110 million and half of it came from stimulus funds from the federal and provincial governments, $22 million came from Western University and $37.5 million from private donors.

HIV vaccine completes first clinical trial Megan Devlin News Editor The HIV vaccine being developed at Western by Chil-Yong Kang, SAV001-H, completed stage one of human clinical trials with flying colours. It showed no adverse effects in any patients and also displayed promising evidence for its efficacy. “The phase one trial looked at the safety of the vaccine in humans.

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Our vaccine was totally safe — there were no adverse effects after administration during the one year of observation after vaccination,” Dr. Kang said. In addition to proving safe for patients, the vaccine also boosted anti-HIV antibody activity. “We vaccinated healthy HIVpositive people to look at adverse effects,” Kang explained. “These people have background levels of

antibody in their bodies and when we vaccinated those people, the level of antibody was boosted tremendously, as high as 64-fold.” These increased immune responses are promising for stages two and three of clinical trials, which will test the vaccine’s effectiveness. On his Reddit Ask Me Anything chat last Friday, Kang said he estimated it would be another eight years before the vaccine would be

ready. He explained the vaccine must still progress through two more stages of human clinical trials to confirm it prevents HIV infection. He said stage three would be the longest, three to four years, because they have to vaccinate populations at risk for HIV infection and wait for natural exposure to occur. Kang confirmed that the vaccine would not benefit those already

infected with the virus. However, his team is also working on a therapeutic vaccine to help HIV positive people. This vaccine is currently being tested on animals, and has human clinical trials planned for the future. SAV001-H was developed using whole genetically modified killed HIV virus. Since the vaccine targets so many of HIV’s viral epitopes, it >> see high pg.3


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