This year’s Lasker Award for clinical medical research will be shared by Harvey Alter, chief of the infectious diseases section and associate director of research in the CC Department of Transfusion Medicine, and Michael Houghton, of the Chiron Corp. in Emeryville, Calif.

From his co-discovery of the Australia antigen to his uncovering of the existence of a "non-A, non-B hepatitis virus" that was ultimately named the hepatitis C virus, Alter’s groundbreaking hepatitis research spans more than 30 years. The Lasker Award cites his pivotal role in ferreting out the cause and drastically reducing the risk of transfusion-associated hepatitis. Houghton was cited for his isolation of the hepatitis C virus.

Notwithstanding the fact that the Lasker Award is popularly known as the American equivalent of the Nobel Prize, Alter received a perhaps even more prestigious and immortalizing honor at the NIH equivalent of the Lasker Award ceremonies—a party to celebrate the event, including a poem on behalf of Alter’s viral victims:

Applications for the 2001–2002 NIH-Duke Training Program in Clinical Research are now available in Building 10, Room B1L403.

Designed primarily for clinical fellows and other health professionals training for careers in clinical research, the program offers formal courses in research design, statistical analysis, health economics, research ethics, and research management. Courses are held at the Clinical Center via videoconferencing from Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C., or on-site by adjunct faculty. A Master of Health Sciences in Clinical Research is awarded by Duke to students who complete the required coursework.

Prospective participants should consult with their institute or center regarding the official training nomination procedure. Application deadline is March 1, 2001. For more information, visit the program website.

The required course for clinical principal investigators, Clinical Research Training, will be repeated on December 12, 2000, 12:00 pm–4:00 pm in Building 10, Lipsett Amphitheater.

The course was designed to address one of the essential standards (Training and Education) recently approved by the NIH for conducting clinical research in the intramural research program. Topics include ethical issues in human subjects research, roles and responsibilities of the investigator and institution, regulatory issues, and clinical investigators and the mass media.

All principal investigators with a protocol approved through the Clinical Center are required to take the course and successfully complete an exam by March 1, 2001.

Registration will be held from November 1–30. To register, please visit the course website.

A conference on "Health Disparities in Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases" will be held at the Natcher Conference Center December 15–16, 2000 (Friday from 8:00 am to 7:30 pm, including a reception from 5:30 on, and Saturday from 8 am to noon). Conference co-sponsors include the Office of Research on Minority Health, the Office of Research on Women’s Health, the Office of Disease Prevention, and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research.

Three of 60 new members elected into the Institute of Medicine in October hail from NIH, and another is the cabinet member who oversees NIH:

Modern Art and Science: Carmen Kaplan, special projects manager of the NIH Office of Research Services, Office of Quality Management, at her post in the Natcher lobby to provide Research Festival goers with info on the updated, comprehensive, user-friendly ORS web site. The redesign project took six months, she said, and was largely the work of OQM’s Pam Dressell. Check out the web site.