Today we offer a good reason to be proud of Norfolk, and to hate Alberto Contador.

EVMS helps find a breakthrough: gel for women that can block HIV

I was reading a bit about this new “vaginal gel” yesterday, but the international stories did not mention EVMS (at least, I didn’t notice), so I’m happy to see the Pilot highlight the local angle on some international breaking news. Henry Gabelnick is the executive director of CONRAD, a program at EVMS that has been studying microbicides, or drugs that kill microbes, for over twenty years. Gabelnick is now in Vienna, Austria, where he will present the results of a field test of the gel form of tenofovir, which his team developed, to the audience at the International AIDS Conference. It looks like it works–women in the 2 1/2 year study who used the gel were almost fifty percent less likely to contract AIDS than women in the control group.

This is awesome news for African women, of course (assuming the challenges of manufacturing, distributing, and regularly applying large quantities of vaginal gel on a widespread population can be overcome…). But it’s also awesome for Norfolk. It’s akin to a pitcher for the Tides getting picked up to start for the Orioles. It shines a bright national and international light on one of the great institutions of our area, EVMS, and gives the school a bit of the recognition it deserves. It’s a moment for Norfolk to stand tall and feel proud, by proxy at least. I like moments like this.

State, U.S. at odds over Bay

Unfortunately, it’s not surprising that the McDonnell administration is standing up to oppose a new set of regulations set down by the Obama administration that are meant to protect the Chesapeake Bay. The regulations call for establishing a strict “diet” of pollutants that each state in the region must restrict itself to, leaving it up to the states to decide how to comply. The central tenet of McDonnell’s opposition takes the form of (I’m paraphrasing) “we like to do things different in Virginia.” Different means not like they do in Maryland, where (I’m quoting) “they’re highly regulated already.”
Doug Domenech, McDonnell’s secretary of natural resources, defends the current voluntary regime on the grounds that it’s working. He’s also “taking a hard line toward the science” behind the fed’s approach. Taking a hard line toward science is also a central tenet of the McDonnell administration in general, given its current fight against climate change scientist Michael Mann, and its lawsuit against air pollution regulations issued by the EPA. The folks in Richmond just don’t seem to like science very much, especially when science suggests cheeky regulations. Science is subject to error, but it is worlds away from uninformed conjecture and wishful thinking, which is pretty much what we’ve got left when we stop trusting science.

Full disclosure–my wife works for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a group that has been advocating for the Chesapeake Clean Water Act, the regulation that McDonnell is fighting. CBF agrees that the Bay is getting healthier, at least in some areas (the latest Bay report card increased the grade to a C from a C- this year), but the scientists at CBF and other organizations feel that the pace of recovery is too slow, given increasing threats from development, farming, and industry in the Bay watershed. The new law proposed by the Obama administration, and strongly advocated and supported by Virginia’s last governor, Tim Kaine, before his departure, is meant to be flexible but firm, to give states a science-based target for setting pollution levels, and to give the feds power to enforce the rules. That’s been the problem in the past–everyone agrees that the Bay should be improved, but no one wants to pay a penalty for letting it slide.

It’s probably too late for McDonnell, Cuccinelli and company to get on board for this. They have made careers out of sticking their tongues out at Washington. I just hope that, in this case, they’ll pack up and get out of the way. We all live on the Chesapeake Bay, we swim in it, fish in it, sail on it. No one, not even the current population of the Virginia statehouse, wants it to become a polluted dead-zone. But you don’t get there by making empty promises. You make rules and you apply them, and you work with the science you’ve got, not the science you wish you had.

Old shipwreck gets lift to permanent new home

The timbers that poked out of the sand after last year’s double nor’easter have found a home. They will go to the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras. It’s hard to imagine that much can be learned about this specific wreck. It occurred over four hundred years ago and there are only fragments of wood left to suggest the ship that once carried people and cargo from Europe to the New World. But then I remember this book, Ship, by David Macaulay. I read this with my son a year ago, and learned all kinds of stuff about how archeologists use libraries and archives to connect the dots when a historic wreck is found. It may take years, but researchers might just dig up the secrets of this old ship.

Ideas for liquor sales come with headaches

Read this piece in the Pilot, and you will learn something. It could have been a simple recounting of the different legislative options under consideration in Richmond for privatizing the ABC stores. Instead, Anita Kumar goes way beyond and gives a concise history of alcoholic regulation in Virginia from 1930 to today.

The options for privatizing are actually pretty interesting, and it’s clear that a lot of thought and consideration is going into selecting the best one, including feedback from many concerned groups. This is an example of the law as it should be–changing to meet the times, incorporating citizen input, balancing fiscal responsibility and human interest. I give McDonnell and Co. full credit so far for their handling of this. And I can’t wait to buy single malt scotch from my local Harris Teeter, instead of the ABC store.

Other Links

Picture this

Today on boingboing.net I saw one of the coolest photos I’ve ever seen–it’s like Van Gogh’s Starry Night meets a Frank Frazetta landscape.

Contador is a punk

Lance Armstrong isn’t likely to win in France this year–he’s been dogged by crashes and bad luck, so his bid to outdo his former teammate Alberto Contador, now racing for a different team, has come to nothing. Like many other fans of the race, however, I’d put my hopes on a new face, Andy Schleck, to stand in for Lance and put Contador in his place.

And now Contador, in case you don’t follow the world of competitive road cycling, is the Spanish cyclist who is currently poised to win the Tour de France. In yesterday’s stage in the Pyrenees he shot past Schleck, who had been leading for the previous three stages, when Schleck’s chain came off at the top of the day’s biggest climb. This is a race faux pas. You can’t claim to legitimately beat the leader if his bike temporarily fails him. Yesterday after the race Contador claimed he didn’t see the chain slip (it happened right in front of him). Last night he issued an apology on YouTube (in Spanish). Not good enough, Contador. I’ll be watching the rest of the Tour, hoping to see Schleck, a perky young guy from Luxembourg with great spirit, grind you into second place at best.