By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff

Robert Langer, a biomedical engineer at MIT best known for his contributions in the fields of tissue engineering and drug delivery, has been named the winner of the 2012 Priestley Medal, a prestigious prize awarded by the American Chemical Society.

The award is usually given to scientists with a traditional chemistry background, including more than a dozen Nobel laureates. Langer, 62, is a bit of an outlier -- a chemical and biomedical engineer whose work has traversed many disciplines. Langer did post-doctoral research at Children's Hospital Boston, working with cancer researcher Dr. Judah Folkman, and throughout his career has brought chemical engineering approaches to biomedical problems.

By Chelsea Conaboy, Globe Staff

A look at the morning's top health industry news.

Pyramid out. Plate in: Daily Dose blogger Deborah Kotz wrote about the new plate icon that has replaced the food pyramid. The design is meant to make it easier for us to decide what to put on our own plates. The Wall Street Journal posted a video here of First Lady Michelle Obama helping the US Department of Agriculture to unveil the new tool. Also check out the early coverage from the New York Times, which included this quote from Dr. Walter C. Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health: “It’s going to be hard not to do better than the current pyramid, which basically conveys no useful information.”

By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff

Facing a tough budget environment, the National Cancer Institute will still manage to fund almost the same number of grants this fiscal year as last year despite a 1 percent budget cut, agency director Dr. Harold Varmus said today during a visit to the Globe. In order to do that, however, the Institute will make cuts to a number of programs, including 5 percent cuts to grants that support designated cancer centers, including MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center.

The NCI budget for fiscal year 2011 is $5.06 billion. Varmus said that advocating for continued federal funding of research has been increasingly difficult because many key legislators who were ardent champions of funding for biomedical research are no longer in the Senate. In particular, he said, the loss of Senator Ted Kennedy, whom Varmus called a mentor and "one of my most important allies," has been felt acutely.

"Everything is on the table for the new Republicans ... We have no champions," he said. "Nobody is coming to our defense."

By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff

Alice A. Chen, a Harvard and MIT graduate student who applies microengineering approaches to biomedical research has been awarded the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize.

Chen, a 29-year-old biomedical engineer, has worked most recently on creating a "humanized mouse" -- a laboratory mouse with an artificial human liver that could become a powerful tool to address a major problem in drug development. Many drugs ultimately fail because of toxic effects that are not detected during animal testing, and problems are often not detected because a human liver works differently than a rodent liver.

A mouse with a humanized liver could be used to improve drug development and screening -- as well as provide a new model for diseases that do not affect rodents, such as hepatitis C.

"Her passion to tackle problems and create solutions through collaboration and tenacity are qualities that must be celebrated at the collegiate level," Joshua Schuler, executive director of the Lemelson-MIT Program said in a statement.

Chen, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, said that her interest in science grew out of her love of art. Unlike some scientists, who knew from day one that they wanted to be an engineer, she was drawn to art projects, and she has found that biomedical engineering gives her her an opportunity to use her creativity to try and solve real problems.

"We try to bring novel solutions to problems in health and science, and that's been my whole goal as a grad student -- to immerse myself in what biological and medical problems are there and be creative about finding solutions to the problems," Chen said.

She has also co-founded a start-up company, Sienna Labs. After receiving her doctoral degree, Chen plans to focus on the start-up, which is developing pigments that could enable greater precision in laser surgeries for skin disease. Chen said the company, with offices in Boston and southern California, is just beginning to raise seed funding, with hopes of launching a clinical trial within a year.

Chen said that her scientific mentors and her graduate program, which included clinical rotations as well as lab work, have inspired and pushed her professionally. But personally, she said, she owes a lot to her mom -- a single, working mother -- who taught her persistence, hard work, and never to take opportunities for granted.

(Photo courtesy of the Lemelson-MIT Program)

By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff

A former associate professor of biology, who was fired by MIT in 2005 for fabricating data in scientific papers, pleaded guilty today in US District Court in Boston to making a false statement in a federal research grant application, the US Attorney's Office said.

The researcher, Luk Van Parijs of Falmouth, will be sentenced June 14 and could receive up to five years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a $250,000 fine.

Van Parijs, 40, was accused of making false claims on a research grant application to the National Institutes of Health. He allegedly made false statements about results in an experiment and about generating a transgenic mouse in his laboratory.

In 2009, the federal Office of Research Integrity found that Van Parijs had engaged in scientific misconduct by submitting false data in numerous grant applications. He was also found to have falsified data in numerous scientific publications and presentations and one book chapter.

You've heard of genomics, the branch of genetics that studies full gene sequences, and maybe proteomics, which focuses on proteins encoded by a genome. Now there's the nascent field of connectomics, a story in today's New York Times tells us, whose goal is to build a map of the mind, one minuscule slice at a time. The project's progress at Massachusetts General Hospital and Children's Hospital Boston are described in this Globe story from October.

Dr. Jeff Lichtman of Harvard leads a team that is studying mice to learn how their brains are wired, in the hope that will ultimately lead to understanding how human memories, personality traits, and skills are stored, today's Times story says. That means slivers of a mouse brain are studied under an electron microscope and then images of their complex wiring will be combined to illuminate the connections between their 100 million neurons.

"The world is not yet ready for the million-petabyte data set the human brain would be,” Dr. Lichtman told the Times. “But it will be."

Another Cambridge scientist explains why it's important.

"You are born with your genes, and they don’t change afterward,” H. Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is working on the computer side of connectomics, told the Times. "The connectome is a product of your genes and your experiences. It’s where nature meets nurture."

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

For decades, they harbored a secret: Why were they living with the AIDS virus, free of symptoms and the need for potent drugs, while so many others infected with the same germ turned deathly ill?

Their innate ability to keep HIV infections in check intrigued researchers, who suspected these people, known as "controllers," might carry clues to designing effective vaccines after nearly 30 years of frustration.

Now, an international team of researchers, led by specialists in Boston, has cracked these HIV-survivors' genetic code, sifting through almost 1.4 million pieces of DNA to discover five amino acids that separate the small cadre of controllers from the vast majority who must take medication or face death.

Even the most experienced marathon runners hit the wall. They reach a point, typically around 21 miles into the 26.2 mile race, when their bodies are running on empty. Whether they started out too fast or fueled up too little, they suffer a steep decline on their agonizing way to the finish line. A new scientific paper from an MD/PhD student at Harvard and MIT applies mathematics to the metabolic problem and comes up with a formula athletes can personalize to avoid breaking down on race day.

Writing in PLoS Computational Biology, Benjamin Rapoport quantifies the problem endurance athletes face. He has been there himself. He has 18 marathons under his belt and in recent years he has given lectures to medical students right after completing the Boston Marathon. But it was in the 2005 New York Marathon that he learned first-hand what it feels like to see your time goals vanish because your legs just won’t keep up the pace.

As any runner who carbo-loads on pre-race pasta dinners knows, the body can burn both fats and carbohydrates as fuel, but carbs are the more efficient choice. The body stores carbs in muscle and in the liver. While exertion can exhaust those stores, even the leanest runner has ample supplies of fat. The trouble is, burning fat is not a good recipe for speed. That’s why performance plummets when runners run out of carbs and their bodies switch to fat. It's like switching to the Atkins diet on the run.

Exercise and nutrition experts have rules of thumb for how many carbs to eat before and during the race, but Rapoport says he can tell a runner exactly how much fuel he or she needs to keep running not only at high efficiency but also at a target pace.

“No two runners are the same, so it’s really very important to be able to give individual runners personalized advice,” he said in an interview. “Even the top 10 percent of runners need to do a little bit of carb loading. Otherwise they are going to hit the wall.”

Rapoport’s formula uses maximum aerobic capacity, known as VO2max. That’s important because the body needs oxygen to break down carbs stored as glycogen. Muscle mass also matters, because that’s where carbs are most accessible.

Don’t know what your VO2max is? You can find out by running a constant pace on a treadmill with a heart rate monitor. A man not training for a marathon might have a VO2max of 45, but an elite male marathoner might have a VO2max of 75 or above. For women, the VO2max range runs from 28 to 52. It measures how much oxygen your body can bring to your muscles.

Leg muscle mass also matters, because that’s where carbs are stored. For men, levels typically range from 14 to 27.5 percent of body mass, and for women, they range from 18 to 22.5 percent.

A man in his 30s trying to hit the Boston Marathon qualifying time of 3:10 who has a VO2max of 50 should consume approximately 30 calories of carbohydrate per kg body mass (about 1,980 calories for a 145-pound runner), assuming that his legs make up at least 15 percent of his body mass, Rapoport said. The equations appear in the paper, along with a helpful table and typical ranges for VO2max and muscle mass.

He uses a car analogy to explain VO2max, carbs, and muscle mass.

“There are three things to worry about. One is the power of the engine, two is the efficiency of the fuel, and three is how big is the gas tank,” he said.

You should also be sure not to start out too fast, he said. Runners do themselves no favors when they do, because they burn more carbs that way and will suffer later.

Rapoport will be testing his formula again in April at the Boston Marathon. He was one of the first to get in on Monday morning, before registration closed in record time.

Some people think hitting the wall is inevitable.

"It's not," Rapoport said.

By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff

A biologist from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a mathematician from Brown University will receive the National Medal of Science, the nation's top science honor.

The two scientists -- Susan Lindquist of the Whitehead Institute and David Mumford of Brown -- will, with eight other scientists, receive the National Medal of Science at a White House Ceremony. Three other people and one team were awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

“The extraordinary accomplishments of these scientists, engineers, and inventors are a testament to American industry and ingenuity,” President Obama said in a press release. “Their achievements have redrawn the frontiers of human knowledge while enhancing American prosperity, and it is my tremendous pleasure to honor them for their important contributions.”

Lindquist, also a biology professor at MIT, has done leading work on protein-folding -- the intricate origami that occurs in cells and that can go awry in everything from rare genetic diseases to Parkinson's.

In a 2009 interview with the Globe, Lindquist spoke about the importance of protein-folding in human health.

"There's a basic biological balance in the cell. Proteins have to fold into these complicated shapes, and getting folded when you're being jostled by your neighbors is not an easy thing to do," Lindquist said. "All living organisms have the same problem, and in human beings it's an extreme problem; it plays a major role in the axis of health versus disease."

She is a co-founder of FoldRx Pharmaceuticals Inc., a Cambridge biotechnology company that was bought by Pfizer earlier this year.

David Mumford, a professor emeritus of applied mathematics at Brown, has worked on problems that challenge algebraic geometry. He has already won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant.

"I'm pleased that this medal will bring attention to the important role of science and mathematics in our society," Mumford said in a statement.

The other winners of the Medal of Science are Yakir Aharonov of Chapman University in California, Stephen J. Benkovic of Pennsylvania State University, Esther M. Conwell of University of Rochester, Marye Anne Fox of University of California San Diego, Mortimer Mishkin of the National Institutes of Health, Stanley B. Prusiner of the University of California San Francisco, Warren M. Washington of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Amnon Yariv of the California Institute of Technology.

The National Medal of Technology and Innovation was awarded to Harry W. Coover of Eastman Chemical Company, Helen M. Free of Miles Laboratories, Steven J. Sasson of Eastman Kodak Company, and a team from Intel Corporation including Federico Faggin, Marcian E. Hoff Jr., and Stanley Mazor.

A pioneer in yeast genetics whose work paved the way for modern molecular biology as well as antibiotic and vaccine development has been honored for his life's work.

Gerald R. Fink, 70, a professor of genetics at MIT and a founding member and former director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, has won the 2010 Genetics Prize of The Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation, the philanthropic organization announced today.

Fink is known for developing a genetic method called yeast transformation in 1977. He devised a way to introduce genetic material from other organisms into living yeast cells so it could be studied.

"Once we figured that out, everything changed,” Fink said in a statement from the Gruber Foundation. “Now, when you wanted to study a gene, you could just do it. You could manipulate the genetics of an organism at will, which made it much easier to figure things
out about gene structure."

Fink will receive the $500,000 prize on November 4 during the annual meeting of the American Society for Human Genetics in Washington, D.C.