Research

F. Gardiner Pearson, 98, of Strafford, a longtime research chemist and amateur radio enthusiast, died Wednesday, April 3, of a heart attack at home. Born in 1914 in the Philadelphia suburbs, Mr. Pearson graduated from Episcopal Academy and Haverford College and in 1941 earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, he was hired as a research chemist for the American Viscose Corp., in Marcus Hook, which was later absorbed by FMC Corp., a chemical manufacturing company in Philadelphia.

Four University of Pennsylvania researchers have been awarded $2.4 million in grants to study pancreatic cancer. They were among $5 million in grants announced Wednesday by the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PCAN) and the American Association for Cancer Research. The money came from PCAN. Both groups were involved in choosing the grant recipients. Only 6 percent of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are alive after five years. PCAN's goal is to double the survival rate by 2020.

University of Pennsylvania researchers believe they are making headway in boosting the immune system to fight a formidable foe - late-stage ovarian cancer. On Saturday, the scientists presented results from the first 31 patients to receive experimental immune therapies made from their own cells, plus anticancer drugs. Distinguishing the effects of the novel therapies from conventional drugs is tricky, especially since two women who have remained cancer-free were in remission when they joined the study.

HIGHLANDS, N.J. - Researchers have gathered enough data to be able to say that an oyster-restoration program wrecked by Hurricane Sandy will work, and they now have more than $16,000 from the Dave Matthews Band to help reestablish the research on a Navy pier. The band, through its Bama Works Fund, gave the grant to the NY/NJ Baykeeper group, which will use it to rebuild and relocate an aquaculture building destroyed by the storm. Meredith Comi, director of Baykeeper's pilot project at the Earle Naval Weapons Station, said many nets holding the oysters were ripped from the pier during the storm.

One woman left Johns Hopkins' intensive-care unit believing her husband and nurse had been plotting to kill her. Another ICU patient had flashbacks of hospital walls covered in blood. A third had visions of big spiders riding bicycles in her room. Suddenly, a favorite hobby, gardening, felt creepy. Doctors used to think patients returned to normal after the delusions and hallucinations of ICU delirium stopped. They're learning instead that some leave the hospital with terrifying false memories, often of being assaulted or imprisoned.

Aaron and Christal Walker live in dread that their daughter will get sick, and in dread that she won't. Six days ago, Avrey Walker, 9, of Redmond, Ore., became the seventh child to receive an experimental gene therapy for leukemia at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. She will soon suffer several days of fevers, nausea, headaches, maybe worse - if the therapy works as it should, marshalling her immune T cells to fight her cancer. Four of the first five children to undergo treatment and get lab results are cancer-free, according to their families and doctors.

Remember the fanfare a while back about a compound in red wine that seemed to extend the life span of bees, flies, and worms? It never looked like much of a good bet for humans, as the equivalent amount of wine was something like 100 glasses a day - plus, scientists were not even sure why it worked in the "lower" organisms. On Thursday, scientists from Harvard and Sirtris, a GlaxoSmithKline company in Cambridge, Mass., said they now know for sure. In the journal Science, the team said it had verified that the key to this antiaging process was activating an enzyme in the human body called SIRT1.

Merck & Co. chief executive officer Kenneth C. Frazier is convinced that nearly everyone, from patients to long-term investors, wants the world's third-largest drugmaker to take big risks. So Merck is plunging ahead in one of medicine's toughest challenges - looking for a drug to slow Alzheimer's disease - despite repeated failures that have led most drugmakers to halt or scale back research on the No. 6 killer in the United States. "When people question me, 'Aren't you putting a lot of money at risk for something that's hard?

By J. Larry Jameson As a scientist and leader of an academic medical center, I call on Congress to approach proposed debt-reduction negotiations by trimming with a scalpel rather than a saw. Blunt cuts will have life-threatening consequences and dampen the tremendous economic benefits of the biomedical research engine. The pace of biomedical research is accelerating. Examples of recent breakthroughs at Penn Medicine underscore why we should be apprehensive about losing research momentum.

IT'S A SMOGGY SUMMER DAY. The air feels thick. Most people know their lungs might suffer on such days. But increasingly, medical researchers are seeing harmful effects from air pollution on the heart, as well. "Inhaling a heart attack" is how one publication put it. Air pollution has both short- and long-term effects that can injure the heart and blood vessels, causing or exacerbating strokes, congestive heart failure, clogged arteries and other problems, research has shown.