Human rights in East Timor

Freedom for East Timor has come at a heavy price. When an overwhelming majority of East Timorese cast ballots for independence in August, retribution from their Indonesian conquerors was swift. A wave of violence left between 70 and 80 percent of the country’s buildings in ashes and up to 10 percent of its 850,000 inhabitants missing or displaced. In November, resistance leader José Ramos-Horta stopped at Yale to speak at a conference on East Timor sponsored by the Yale-Griffin Center for Health and Human Rights and the Health and Human Rights Committee of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. He was once asked, he said, if the struggle for freedom was worth a single human life. “If the people of East Timor manage to build a society that is free of abuse, a country based on the rule of law, a country of genuine equality,” said Ramos-Horta, co-winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, “if we are able to build a country where everyone has basic necessities, where everyone has access to education, health care and good nutrition, then maybe I will say it was worth it.”

Is sex important?

Getting women’s health issues on the national radar, Florence Haseltine, M.D., said during a visit to Yale in October, first meant taking sex out of the equation. “Ten years ago, two headlines related to women,” she quipped, “PMS leads to murder and the pill causes cancer.” Haseltine, a gynecologist and director of the Center for Population Research at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said health institutions dominated by men and the largely male U.S. Congress were leery of anything related to sex. The key to bringing attention to women’s health issues resided in a simple statistic. Most medications for women are taken by women over 50. Researchers decided to eliminate from study women under 50, Haseltine said. “That got rid of sex,” she told members of the Yale-New Haven Hospital Auxiliary, which sponsored her talk, “Is Sex Important?” “You don’t have kids, you don’t have abortions and you don’t have sex. That’s wrong, but it’s the reality in Washington.” 

HIV as a cure rather than a threat

When Inder Verma, Ph.D., proposed HIV as a vector for gene therapy two years ago, the response was swift. “‘This guy must be nuts,’” Verma said, describing the initial reaction. “‘Why would he put HIV vectors into people?’” But Verma, a researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, saw that HIV could overcome problems inherent in other viral vectors because it can both elude the immune system and integrate into non-dividing cells such as those in the liver and brain. He has had some success with the HIV vector in animal models. In his talk in November sponsored by the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, he said he has eliminated the proteins in HIV that make it pathogenic. “We believe it is as safe as we can make it in terms of its ability to cause disease.” 

Prions, mad cows
and the Nobel Prize

For Stanley B. Prusiner, M.D., vindication came in 1997 when he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the potentially infectious proteins he called prions. During the 20 years leading up to the honor, Prusiner was seen as a heretic for his view that “rogue” proteins could cause disease. “How is it that a protein can be infectious?” asked Prusiner, professor of neurology, virology and biochemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, during a visit to the medical school in November. The ubiquitous and normally harmless prions, Prusiner found, can take on an abnormal conformation and set off a chain reaction of malformed cells that trigger diseases of the brain, such as scrapie in sheep, mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Prusiner is now looking for compounds that will thwart prions’ pathogenesis.