MARCH 1, 2013 The Second Best Thing About Payday VOL. LXV, NO. 5 Cardin Cheers NIH Workforce at Town Hall Meeting, Hopes Sequestration Can Be Avoided By Rich McManus ABOVE · Wear Red Day featured dancing, apparel and outreach. See story on p. 12. t his second NIH Town Hall A appearance in 17 months, features and his fourth official campus visit 1 during that time, Sen. Ben Cardin Cardin Urges NIH’ers to Speak Out (D-MD) on Feb. 8 assured a Masur Against Sequester Auditorium audience of his enthu- 2 siastic support for the NIH work- Poet Dove To Give Rall Lecture force and its mission and his opti- mism that Congress and President 5 Obama can find an alternative to Management Intern Program Invites Applications painful budget cuts required by sequestration, due to take effect Sen. Ben Cardin (r, D-MD) and NIH director Dr. Francis Collins were present for a Feb. 8 Town Hall meeting. 12 Mar. 1. ‘Wear Red Day’ Draws Fashionable Cardin spent the first 20 minutes of the hour-long session thanking employees for Crowd “world-class” research that has made inroads in cancer, heart disease, HIV/AIDS and mental health and giving a budget deficit overview. He had arrived at NIH earlier in departments see cardin visit, page 6 Questions Remain About the Spice of Life Briefs 2 STEP Forum Shakes Feedback 5 Up Salt Debate Milestones 10 By Carla Garnett Does America have an unhealthy relationship with salt? A recent Staff Training in Extramu- Dr. Gregory Germino ral Programs forum, Dr. David Rock applies brain science to leadership. “Dietary Salt: To Shake or Not to Shake?,” presented a 2-hour moder- Create a ‘Toward’ State ated discussion on how much salt is appropri- Author Rock Applies Brain Research to ate in our diet. Change Management “Humans have had a long and complicated By Dever Powell relationship with sodium that goes back thou- Your team gets downsized, you’re relocating sands of years,” said moderator Dr. Gregory members to smaller offices, you’re shuffling Germino of NIDDK. “Long ago, humans dis- their pet projects and your way of doing busi- covered that not only did it taste good, but ness has got to change. also—perhaps even more importantly from a commercial perspective—salt has an impor- How do you make it work when change is per- tant role as a preservative...However, even Lot ceived as a threat? What makes an organiza- in the Book of Genesis knew that too much tional-change event succeed? The NIH Record is recyclable was probably a bad thing!” as office white paper. The answer lies in the science of the brain, see salt debate, page 8 see managing change, page 4 therapies for allergic reactions and prevention of allergies in children and adults. Orioles and Nationals Online Ticket Sale briefs Batter up! It’s that time of year again. The R&W will once again offer tickets to the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals. To better serve the NIH, NOAA Poet Dove To Give Rall and HHS communities, tickets will be sold online. Cultural Lecture, Mar. 13 Nationals tickets will go on sale on Tuesday, Mar. 5 at Pulitzer Prize winner 8 a.m. online at www.recgov.org/nihshop. R&W has 2 and former U.S. Poet seats in section 219, row D. Ticket prices are available Laureate Rita Dove will on the R&W listserv. Orioles tickets will go on sale deliver the J. Edward Rall Thursday, Mar. 7 at 8 a.m. online. Available are two Cultural Lecture as part of regular season tickets (2 seats behind first base – the 2012-2013 Wednes- section 14BBB, seats 7-8) for $70 ($35 per seat). Tick- day Afternoon Lecture ets for Yankees and Red Sox games will be $100 per Series. “An Afternoon with game. You must be a preferred 2013 R&W member to Poet Rita Dove: Sonata purchase tickets. When you come to pick your tickets Mulattica,” will be held on up at your local R&W store, you will be required to Mar. 13 at 3 p.m. in Masur show proof of membership. Preferred memberships Auditorium, Bldg. 10. can also be purchased at the time you pick up your tickets or online. Membership is $9 for the year. Dove served as U.S. poet laureate from 1993 to 1995 and was the youngest person—and the first African American—to receive NLM Lecture Features this highest official honor in American poetry. She Weng, Mar. 6 is the author of nine collections of poetry, including The National Library of The NIH Record is published biweekly at Thomas and Beulah, which earned her the 1987 Medicine Informatics Bethesda, MD by the Editorial Operations Pulitzer Prize, making her the second African- Lecture Series will feature Branch, Office of Communications and Public American poet (after Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950) to Dr. Chunhua Weng on Liaison, for the information of employees of receive this award. Her most recent book is Sonata Wednesday, Mar. 6, from 2 the National Institutes of Health, Department Mulattica (2009), a poetic treatise on the life of of Health and Human Services. The content is to 3 p.m. in Natcher Bldg., reprintable without permission. Pictures may 19th-century Afro-European violin prodigy George balcony A. She will speak be available upon request. Use of funds for Polgreen Bridgetower. She is the sole editor of the on “Bridging the Semantic printing this periodical has been approved by Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Gap between Research the director of the Office of Management and Poetry (2011) and is the Commonwealth professor of Budget through September 30, 2013. Eligibility Criteria and English at the University of Virginia. Clinical Data: Methods To receive alerts to our latest issue, send an and Issues.” email to [email protected] with the words Seating for the lecture is on a first-come, first-served “Subscribe NIHRECORD” in the message body. basis. For more information, or to request reason- With the burgeoning adoption of electronic health NIH Record Office Bldg. 31, Rm. 5B41 able accommodation, contact Jacqueline Roberts at records (EHRs), vast amounts of clinical data are Phone (301) 496-2125 Fax (301) 402-1485 (301) 594-6747 or [email protected]. increasingly available for computational reuse. How- Web address http://nihrecord.od.nih.gov The lecture honors the memory of Rall, founder ever, there is a semantic gap between the raw of the Clinical Endocrinology Branch (now within clinical data and free-text human-provided eligibility Editor criteria. Weng will describe the evolving understand- Richard McManus NIDDK) and scientific director of the National Insti- [email protected] tute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases, which is ing of the semantic gap and approaches to overcom- now represented by NIDDK and NIAMS. He recom- ing it in the context of EHR-based phenotyping and Associate Editor clinical trial prescreening. Carla Garnett mended in 1984 that NIH add a cultural lecture to its [email protected] Director’s Lecture series. Weng is the Florence Irving assistant professor of Staff Writers biomedical informatics at Columbia University, where Jan Ehrman STEP Forum on Allergies, Mar. 19 she has been a faculty member since 2007. [email protected] The staff training in extramural programs (STEP) The talk will be broadcast live and archived at http:// Dana Steinberg committee will present a Science in the Public videocast.nih.gov/. Sign language interpreters will [email protected] Health forum on the topic “Allergies: Food, Drugs be provided. Those who need reasonable accommo- Belle Waring and Pollen—Oh My!” on Tuesday, Mar. 19, from 9 to dation to participate should contact Ebony Hughes, [email protected] noon in Lister Hill Auditorium, Bldg. 38A. (301) 451-8038, [email protected] or the Federal Relay (1-800-877-8339). The NIH Record reserves the right to make Almost everyone has allergies, ranging from minor corrections, changes or deletions in submitted copy in conformity with the policies of the inconveniences to life-threatening situations. Are paper and HHS. allergies becoming more prevalent? Why might NIH...Turning Discovery Into Health your immune system react to seemingly harmless substances as though they are threats? Join us as we look at responses to food, drug and environmental allergens. You will learn about 2 NIH RECORD MARCH 1, 2013 2 MARCH 1, 2013 MARCH 1, 2013 VOL. LXV, NO. 5 NCI Expands Global Cancer Health Activities World Cancer Day was recognized on Feb. 4 and marked an opportunity to acknowledge there is serious cause for concern about cancer as a growing international health problem. Cancer incidence and death rates are climbing rapidly in the developing world. By 2030, it is estimat- ed that of the more than 20 million global can- cer deaths, nearly two-thirds will occur in devel- oping countries. NCI director Dr. Harold Varmus has made improving global cancer health among his top priorities. He has formed a Center for Global Health (CGH) to better coordinate and expand the institute’s global research activities. Ted New Communications Contract Draws Interest Trimble, director of CGH, and Varmus agreed More than two dozen vendors who provide a range of communication services visited that the opportunity and the obligation to NIH on Jan. 30 for the kick-off of the NIH Public Information and Communication Ser- address the global burden of cancer have nev- vices (PICS) master contract. The event, held in Natcher Conference Center, drew staff, er been greater. They believe NCI’s expanding primarily from NIH communications and public liaison offices, who had an opportunity efforts in the global health arena can build on the to meet the vendors.