Hello all, good morning.
Welcome to the National Press Club,
I'm Steven Dissaverio, Director of the Institute for
Basic Biomedical Sciences at Johns Hopkins.
And on behalf of my colleagues,
in the basic sciences of Hopkins,
and the clinical departments, I'd like to welcome you to
our eighth consecutive annual Science Writer's Boot Camp.
For the last several years held here in Washington
at the Press Club.
Now why do we have a boot camp to begin with, well science,
as you know, can be nuanced.
With your deadlines, it's very difficult to
get all the information you need to cover your science beats.
And it sometimes helps just to spend a day digging deeper
into one topic, to get the background that you'd like.
And we, as always, want to help you get the story right.
I'd also put out there some of the outstanding science
that's being done within the walls of Hopkins.
Now another reason why you'd like to have boot camp is
illustrated by a story we put out recently about cells and
the brain that might signal a mouse to stop eating.
The next slide shows some of the resulting headlines.
Pretty interesting, they got it completely wrong.
And I particularly like the banner
at the lower website because astrology turns out to be one
of the the tabs you can see,
which has as much relationship with the story as anything else.
The stories actually were a bit more accurate than the headlines
imply but, nonetheless,
science is often difficult to cover and we can't help you.
Now as Director of the IBBS,
the Basic Science Institute, I'd like to showcase for
you how basic research affects everyone's health.
Our institute is an association
of 125 primary and another 120 secondary faculty at Hopkins.
It's one of the largest associations of scientists doing
fundamental research in the United States,
with an annual research budget of over $110 million or
roughly a quarter, a fifth to a quarter of the entire
NIH budget of the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins.
You're all aware that there has been increasing pressure for
scientists to focus on outcomes and outpatient application and
we'll hear a lot about that today.
But I want to underscore that without the pipeline of basic
discovery, therapies will not be realized.
In my own field which touches on leukemia and
lymphoma, some of today's most important treatments
are based on discoveries made more than 40 years ago.
And is taking that long for
the discoveries to mount one on another, to eventually
culminate in the development of effective treatment.
It's also an honor for us to do basic research at a place
like Johns Hopkins medicine.
Hopkins has six hospitals, it's an academic medical center.
Has presence in Baltimore of course, but
also in Washington DC.
We've got almost 1,000 full time faculty members.
Almost 40 community locations, and we're one of the two largest
recipients of NIH research funding in the United States.
More important, Hopkins was founded by an abolitionist
who believed that healthcare should be provided to all,
regardless of ethnicity and regardless of ability to pay,
and that's something that Hopkins still adheres to today.
It's a very important place in American medicine, and a very
important place in the life of the Baltimore Washington region.
I'd like to introduce you in this slide to our media
relations team, almost all of whom are here today.
They're all willing to help connect you
with the right expert at Johns Hopkins.
And everyone's beat areas are listed in today's program.
If you want to keep it simple, just use the contact email
above, and we'll help you get to the right person.
For those of you who have attended past events,
thank you for coming to join us again.
I can't overemphasize how much we want this event to be
for you.
You have picked all of the topics so far.
Regenerative medicine, that'd be genetics.
Genomic revolution, the brain.
And heart disease.
And sometime today you'll receive an email survey,
please fill it out.
I review each of the surveys, and
we use those results to choose our future topics.
This year's topic is weighty matters,
recent advances in metabolism, obesity, and diabetes research.
You chose the topic last year and we agree it's timely.
It's been in the news quite a bit.
A quick search of headlines just last week
shows that these topics are not going away anytime soon.
We did a quick scan of LexisNexis to see how many
stories have been written this year so
far, compared to the relatively fat free 80s,
and you can see that there's been a massive acceleration
the number of stories that have been done in the areas.
We're excited about today's line up and
excited that some of our most prestigious experts at Hopkins
can be here today to share with you the latest in the field.
I won't introduce the speakers individually now but
I will before each talk.
They'll be here for you to schmooze as the day goes on,
at the breaks and at lunch.
This is an overview of today's agenda.
We've planned, as I said, ample breaks.
If we get a little bit behind in the sessions, no worry.
We should end on time, at 4:00.
Because it got plenty of opportunity to catch up, and
at four o'clock I'd like you to join us for a reception if you
can, in the first amendment room right nearby.
We'll have more snacks and an open bar.
It'll be a nice way to catch up.
Now, how weighty is the problem?
Diabetes, as you know,
is a massive problem in the United States, and
is also starting to be a problem worldwide, in Europe.
It already is quite a problem in the Middle East, for example.
This is part of an infographic that Hopkins developed
with the CDC and the American Diabetes Association,
you've got a copy of the larger infographic in your folders.
Here are a few facts about obesity from the CDC.
More than a third of U.S. adults are obese.
About 17% of children and adolescents are obese and
the map shows the geographic prevalence of obesity.
I think any correspondence to the electoral map of
the United States is merely coincidental.
[LAUGH] They do, had to put that,
I'm being waved down by my media team.
>> [LAUGH] >> I am in the Press Club, and
I'm exercising my first amendment rights.
>> [LAUGH] >> And it's said,
that these issues have a lot to do with metabolism,
which is hopelessly illustrated here.
And this is just why you came today, to help us decipher for
you the latest research in metabolism.
So, let's get started.