Delivering Impact
Monash University Magazine by Monash University
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MICROBIAL ASSASSIN BRINGS DOWN A KILLER
By Monash University May 17, 2012
Words: Julian CribbA tiny microbe employed as a living ‘guided missile’ has raised hopes for halting in its tracks one of the world’s most debilitating pandemics – the dengue virus.Over the past two years an international scientific team led by Monash University’s Professor Scott O’Neill has achieved a series of remarkable breakthroughs in the war on the dengue virus, a mosquito borne scourge that infects 50 to 100 million people a year and threatens the health of 2.5 billion citizens of the tropics. The microbial ‘missile’ is a bacterium that, in effect, intercepts the virus between its transmission from mosquito to human. Researchers say the breakthrough may have opened up a fresh avenue for the control of other insect-borne diseases including malaria, which claims around two million lives a year. Without an effective control, the impact of these diseases is likely to only get worse as many parts of the world get warmer and wetter.
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DEMOCRACY’S MISSING JOB DESCRIPTIONS
By Monash University May 17, 2012
Words: Catherine NorwoodProviding husbands for daughters, getting people out of prison, curing alcoholism, or even preventing a person from being gay. These are examples of requests, not to a deity, but to parliamentarians.Such requests can be as long as they are eclectic. And in these days of social media, accelerating from email through to Facebook and Twitter, constituents expect a response almost immediately, says social researcher Professor Colleen Lewis. As head of Social Science at Monash University’s Johannesburg campus in South Africa, Professor Lewis is part of an international team investigating the education and training of federal Members of Parliament (MPs) in 10 countries: Australia, Canada, Chile, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Romania, South Africa, the UK, Uruguay and Vietnam.
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TROPICAL MEDICINE GOES MOLECULAR
By Monash University May 17, 2012
Words: Dr Gio BraidottiNot everyone can make a machine able to explore the human genome and its vast network of DNA molecules; the frontier of ‘inner space’.It is a comparatively new speciality, where the machines are as pioneering as they are functional in their probing of the human body’s inner cosmos. These machines – DNA microarray scanners – make it possible to map this unfamiliar and information-rich space and scientists have invented a unique kind of cartography for the job. Called comparative genomics, it links the human body – its formation, ancestry, and breakdown during disease – to the structure of discrete regions on DNA molecules (genes) and the hereditary information they emanate. Like explorers of times past, genomics researchers too possess the potential to redraw the world – by forever changing our understanding and practise of medicine.
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WAKE-UP CALL ON POLICE SHUT-EYE
By Monash University May 17, 2012
Words: Alexandra RoginskiMortality figures for US police officers over recent decades show an officer is more likely to die from an unintended event like a car crash than in a so-called ‘felonious death’ such as a shooting.The significance of this deepens when you consider a recently published study on sleep disorders among police officers. The US study, led by Monash University’s Associate Professor Shantha Rajaratnam, found sleep disorders among police officers to be a serious occupational hazard with potentially fatal consequences. For example, a quarter of the 5000 officers who participated in the study reported falling asleep while driving, “at least once a month”. This is on top of whatever other impacts fatigue has on decision-making and day-to-day operations. The study, the results of which were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in December 2011, found that over 40 per cent of US police officers screened positive for one of five major sleep disorders
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OUR SHAKY FUTURE UNDER PRESSURE
By Monash University May 17, 2012
Words: Tim TreadgoldBeing able to predict an earthquake has long been a dream for the geosciences, but an Australian research team may have brought the world a small step closer to achieving this capability. Key to this recent development is a greater understanding of the immense forces that created the Andes mountain chain of South America, and the emergence of a potential explanation for a mysterious time gap in that mountain-building process. Until now, geologists have had a reasonable grasp of the role played by movement in the tectonic plates into which the earth’s upper layer, or crust, is segmented. The Andes are a textbook example of an oceanic plate (called the Nazca Plate) driving under the South American continent; a ‘subduction’ movement invisible to the naked eye, but so powerful that it created the 7000-kilometre mountain chain – complete with its unusual bulge in the middle known as the Bolivian orocline (a distinct bend or deformation in a mountain range).
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TEST TUBE CUBS IN CAT FIGHT FOR LIFE
By Monash University May 17, 2012
Words: Mandy ThooTest tube cubs have emerged as a new hope to halt the slide towards extinction of the snow leopard, Bengal tiger and other endangered big cats driven from their natural habitats.By converting cells taken from the adult animal into embryonic stem-like cells and freezing them, scientists may have dramatically increased the chances of saving animals whose numbers have declined critically in the wild. Tigers, leopards and other big cats have dwindled alarmingly worldwide in recent decades due to loss of habitat, declining prey and illegal hunting. The solitary and secretive nature of cats makes conservation an uphill battle, but scientists from the Monash Institute of Medical Research and the University of Queensland in Australia, have developed a simple, painless solution that may lead to ‘test tube cubs’, allowing conservation efforts to be performed without disrupting the wild cats in their natural habitats. Registered in the ‘Red list of threatened species’, there are an estimated 3500 to 7000 snow leopards left in the world
