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Since the Millennium Development Goals were put forth as a global challenge, how well have we rallied together to meet the needs of the world’s poor?
These goals were set in September 2000 at the Millennium Assembly of the United Nations. In fact, most of them were recycled from commitments at international gatherings during the 1990s. Some countries are making progress but the stunning and sad fact is that the very poorest countries in the world, in general, are falling further and further behind in meeting those goals; and the rich countries that promised to help them to do more have really lost attention, I’m afraid, and are focusing so much on issues of terrorism, war and peace, and their own internal issues, that they’re just not paying the attention that they promised to global poverty.

This is necessarily a contract between the rich and the poor, isn’t it?
When the goals were set at the Millennium Assembly and then followed up in several important gatherings in which the United States was the key participant, such as at the International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, which President Bush attended, the rich and the poor countries said, “We have to do this together.” The rich countries acknowledged that the impoverished countries could not fight disease on their own or solve the problems of hunger on their own. They would need help - a lot more help than they receive today. This commitment was put in a very specific promise: the rich countries would make concrete efforts towards raising their development assistance to 0.7% of their GNP. But despite this promise, the situation is worsening throughout Africa and in many other impoverished regions of the world. I think it is really a terrible mistake on the part of the rich world not to be paying more attention to this. It hurts us in the end by contributing to global instability.

When you look at the numbers, however, it appears as though we have a real shot at ending poverty sometime soon.
Well, the crazy thing about all of this is that you’d think we’d be paying more attention to these life and death issues. There are millions of children dying every year of readily preventable or treatable conditions, like the nearly one million children dying of measles, even though there’s a vaccine to stop it. There are nearly three million children dying of malaria, even though we have medicines that cure malaria. So you have this stunning challenge, but at the same time there are very specific, relatively straightforward interventions in a lot of cases that could address these problems. Poverty reduction is not rocket science, but the gap between where we are and what we could do if we fulfilled our promises is stunning. (more…)

Make peace, not war: With the world now spending one million million dollars on the military per year and fifty-four percent of peace agreements breaking down within five years of signature, can we say with sincerity that we’re committed to peace?

From Swords to Plowshares
Since the late 1960s, Seymour Melman, professor emeritus at Columbia University, has championed the conversion project ® from a military to civilian economy ® and has deliberated on the public good we could achieve for the money we spend on the military.

Technological enhancements to conventional weaponry may be redundant in a world with nuclear arms, but there’s no denying that the civilian sector has absorbed military-derived innovation over the years.

We are all part of military culture, at times of war and peace. Whether we know it or not, we incriminate ourselves every time we use technological innovations known as “spin-offs,�? which have arisen from military-sponsored research and later get adopted by civil society. Since Napoleon, the long line of spin-offs have included canned foods, plastics, microwave technology, radar, lasers, the Internet, night vision, jet engines, cell phones, GPS systems, Gore-Tex, frozen foods, and power bars. (more…)

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Describe the sense of urgency you feel right now with respect to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Zimbabwe?
It’s very hard to describe the magnitude of the epidemic in a country like Zimbabwe unless you’ve been there. It’s staggering. Everywhere you look, there it is. There are cottage industries that build coffins. There are orphan feeding programs, virtually everywhere. If you go into the hospitals, there’s complete overcrowding. There’s no one that I work with there who hasn’t been touched by it somehow. It’s completely common that when someone’s not around, they’re attending a funeral. About one-third of the population is infected, and it cuts across all socioeconomic levels.

You founded the Women’s Global Health Imperative (WGHI) in 2001. What is its main objective?
Our main objective is to deal with HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections and even unintended pregnancy in the context of addressing our over-arching theme: gender disparities and gender inequities, and how that gender imbalance places women at greater risk for HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, and unintended pregnancy. We have two major areas of research right now. The first is exploring women controlled methods of prevention of these outcomes. Male condoms, when used correctly and consistently, are the most effective way to prevent HIV transmission heterosexually. The problem with male condoms is that men control their use and, insofar as a woman would have control over when her male partner uses condoms, it requires negotiation and willingness on his part. So we’re looking at methods that women might be able to control, such as microbicides and the diaphragm - methods that women can use themselves without having to rely on negotiating with their male partner. The other way we’re looking at gender and vulnerability to HIV is by way of economic intervention. Our hypothesis is that if you can provide young women with economic opportunity and make them economically independent, then they will be less reliant on sexual partners, particularly older sexual partners, for material goods and, in some cases, even survival.

Who is part of the WGHI network?
In Zimbabwe, our major collaborators are with the University of Zimbabwe and the medical school. In India, our major collaborator is Samuha, a non-governmental organization. In Mexico our major collaborator is the National Institute for Public Health, in Cuernavaca. In the U.S., we are an institution based in San Francisco, and we collaborate with many community groups. Most of our work here is done in what’s called the Mission District in San Francisco, where there are a lot of Latino immigrants. (more…)

Multidisciplinary teams of scientists are joining forces to design materials with built in stimulus response. These smart materials can be customized with sensitivities to signals such as heat, light, impact, pulses of electric currents, and motion. While chemists research the realm of the supersmall with the mission to develop enzyme-like tools to construct supersmart self-assembling materials, tissue engineers are building polymer scaffolds that support the growth of human organs and tissues. Robert Langer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Jay Vacanti, from Harvard Medical School, initiated this burgeoning field of tissue engineering and have successfully synthesized new biodegradable polymer systems that have supported the growth of livers, cartilage (nose, ears), and nerves. The cells that are seeded on these structures are smart “natural” materials; they manage to recreate their respective tissue functions. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Scott White studies self-repairing plastics. He is an associate professor in aeronautical and astronautical engineering and takes his design inspiration from the rhinoceros horn. He and a multidisciplinary team of scientists designed a biomimetic polymer with embedded capsules full of “healing” liquid that, upon rupture, self-corrects cracks in plastic and fiberglass. According to White, this self-healing plastic can be used anywhere synthetic polymer is used now, from microchips to the wings on a full-size aircraft.

SELF-TIGHTENING (left). An image sequence of a thermoplastic shape-memory polymer developed by Andreas Lendlein shows the transition from the temporary shape of a straight rod to a self-tightening knot. It has use as a suture that ties itself during minimally invasive surgical procedures.

SELF HEALING (right). An optical microscope image of Scott White’s self-healing plastic. The microcapsules are colored red and the catalyst is black (the dark specs in the image). The healing agent has penetrated through the crack front, the solid red line across the center of the image.