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Track and field head south for Cal-Nevadas

In preparation for the Cal-Nevada Championships, Fresno State track and field coach Scott Winsor had to address the “C” word to his team while in practice.

“Our kids are going to see some good competition – probably competition that they haven’t seen yet,” Winsor said. “But that’s what we need.”

The Cal-Nevada Championships is one of the marquee meets for the Fresno State track and field team every year. This year, the Bulldogs have to travel to UCLA to compete against some of the top track programs in the state of California and Nevada.

The trip to Los Angeles will mark a first in the Cal-Nevada meet. The Championships will be held on the UCLA campus. Scott Winsor will also experience his first trip to UCLA.

“I’ve never competed at UCLA,” Winsor said. “I competed at Mount Sac every year for 20 years, but never at UCLA.”

Winsor still believes that being in Los Angeles will be a benefit for his team as the season progresses.

“I guess it’s a great venue and a beautiful track,” Winsor said. “Its kind of like the old basketball saying ‘the basket is ten feet high.’ The track is 400 meters, that’s what they’ll run on and that’s what we’ll do.”

For Winsor and the Bulldogs’ track and field squad, the competition level will be huge, especially with a couple of Pac-10 teams involved.

“It’s going to be a heck of a meet,” Winsor said. “It is every year.”

Winsor said that the team needed some time to prepare for the Cal-Nevada meet and has been impressed with the overall progression.

“We’ve had a good couple of weeks here,” Winsor said. “Last week was very good for us. Our decathletes had a heck of a day, so we are looking to build on that. The kids know that we need to step it up and get better every week.”

Not only do the Bulldogs need to step it up every week, they also want to win the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) title and then send some of their athletes to the NCAA Regional.

“Our minimum goal is to win WAC,” Winsor said. “But above and beyond that, we want to make sure that we are prepared to get to the regional’s and then prepare to get out of regionals and into the NCAAs. This is just another opportunity to show the kids how to do that.”

One key element on the women’s side for the Bulldogs is WAC individual champion Tierra Hilliard, who will be participating in the sprint competition. Hilliard is familiar with some of the competition in the Cal-Nevada meet.

“We saw a few teams last week,” Hilliard said. “There’s like 30 schools, so there’s going to be good competition everywhere.”

Hilliard is content with being a conference individual champion, but she is looking to have more results during the Cal-Nevada meet and beyond.

“It felt really good to win the WAC and I’m going to go out and try to do it again in the 200 and 400 this year,” Hilliard said.

On the men’s side, senior jumper Erik Fossen wants to use the Cal-Nevada meet to reach the NCAA regional. He is competing in the high, long and triple jump.

“I’m hoping to get one regional qualifying mark, hopefully all three,” Fossen said. “For long and triple I’ll go against a couple guys from UCLA and a couple guys from Northridge. There should be some good competition for long jump because I’m in the last flights, so it should be really good competition to push me even further.”

A look at the structure of ASI

As the Associated Students, Inc. (ASI) elections draw near for the 2009-10 school year, students might want an idea of just exactly what the organization does and how it works.

The student government mimics much of the current U.S. system of democracy, but is altered to fit the university’s needs.

It is easiest to break it down by branches.

Executive Branch

The executive branch ranks in the order of president, executive vice president and vice president of finance and according to the ASI bylaws “the executive officers shall, at all times while holding office, satisfy the eligibility and qualification requirements established by the Chancellor of The California State University.”

Vice president of finance is a position characterized by the management of the ASI budget, which is approximately $650,000, depending on student fees.

“It is a very stressful position because work doesn’t end when you leave the office,” said Vice President of Finance Lauren Johnson.

“I have to keep track of all ASI expenditures.”

As chief financial officer, Johnson gives advice to senators about the appropriateness of their expenditures. The position also requires the creation of the following year’s budget.

Johnson works closely with executive vice president Jessica Sweeten. According to article two, section three “the executive vice president shall be selected by a simple majority of the voting members of the senate each academic year.”

The position requires the executive vice president to cast the deciding vote of any ties in senate decision-making and in senate meetings is the senate chair. In the event that the president is unable to fulfill his or her duties, the executive vice president will fill the vacancy.

Serving as the current ASI president is Graham Wahlberg.

According to ASI bylaws the president can fill vacant positions that are then confirmed by a simple majority of the senate, can veto any action made by the senate, can issue executive orders and any is responsible for other duties “prescribed by the student senate.

“[University officials] treat my position as an equal,” said Wahlberg.

“I call to light what we see them doing wrong or what we disagree with.”

As head of ASI, Wahlberg is given the ability to create a president’s cabinet. However, citing a small budget and other important things to focus on, Wahlberg said he did not create a personal staff for the year.

“You have to be very careful with something that powerful,” said Wahlberg.

According to the president’s handbook, 75 percent of time is spent in meetings, speaking and making public appearances while 15 percent is for special appearances and 10 percent is spent on e-mails and making phone calls.

Legislative Branch

The legislative branch currently consists of 15 senators, eight of which are senators of colleges and seven of which are senators at-large.

Next year will see the addition of two new senators.

Starting this fall, the senator of auxiliary will be changed to the senator of legislative affairs and there will be a senator serving as a Greek liaison.

All senate members are dignified as representatives for the constituents of their specific areas, and in charge of being the student voice to administration.

ASI bylaws state that senators shall associate themselves with issues that directly affect students and are to approve the yearly budget. In addition, in order to override a president’s veto the senate needs a two-thirds vote.

In past years, senate members were required by ASI to complete three projects a year.

However, when Wahlberg entered office, he believed that the senate needed to be working closer with the student body.

Therefore, he made it mandatory for senators to meet with their constituents and department faculty once a week.

“All these senators are really taking this to heart and doing such an amazing job,” said Wahlberg.

“They are starting to become infectious on campus.”

Working in close partnership with their constituents, senators bring their concerns and proposed ideas to senate meetings.

Meetings are held every other Wednesday and are run in strict, professional manner. Senators each give updates about the concerns and future plans of their constituents.

The two most important aspects on the agenda are the actions and information.

Actions are items that the senate votes on, such as issuing money to a senator for a college event. Informational items are simply topics discussed in the meetings, but are not voted on.

In addition, another chief responsibility at these meetings is to pass or deny solutions.

If the university decides to make any new policies or increase any fees, then the senate votes either for or against the proposal.

Judicial Branch

Five people make up the judiciary and all have lifetime terms, which means as long as they are a student enrolled at the university they are part of the court.

Members of the court are in constant communication through e-mail said Amanda Fine, who is in her first year on the court.

The members do not meet on a regular basis until the end of the school year when election season is near.

According to the ASI bylaws, “Any member of the Associated Students who desires to bring an issue to the student court may due so by submitting a written statement to the Chief Justice, in care of the Associated Students’ office.”

While the judicial branch deals with discrepancies between the legislative and executive branch, they mostly deal with election violations.

“We really only deal with issues when it comes to the elections,” Fine said.

“We are objective individuals who aren’t really involved in ASI and can look in from the outside to ensure the integrity of the elections.”

Other than assuring that candidates follow the rules of the election, the members of the judicial branch don’t have any other major responsibilities.

The structure of ASI is not overly-complicated, but at the same time it does take time to understand the specifics.

Those involved in student government have high hopes that students will better understand the purpose of it all to get more involved.

Campus’ pancreatic cancer research leads the way

As the average lifespan of Americans increases with each generation, the likelihood of an individual developing cancer, the second leading cause of death in the United States, increases with each passing day.

“It is very likely that cancer will surpass heart disease as the leading cause of deaths in the United States over the next couple of years,” said Dr. Jason Bush, assistant professor of cancer biology at California State University, Fresno.

Non-melanoma skin cancer is the most prevalent form of cancer in the United States, with more than one million new cases expected to develop in 2009, but it is not the most deadly.

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, pancreatic cancer, is considered the most deadly form of cancer, with less than five percent of individuals expecting to survive past five years after initial diagnosis.

During the past three years, Bush has been establishing a cancer research laboratory at Fresno State, getting recognition as part of a campus team from the National Institutes of Health, which has recently received an infrastructure grant worth $4.5 million over the course of five years for molecular analyses at CSU Fresno.

His laboratory consists of several projects running simultaneously, with themes such as defining the differences between metastatic bone-seeking and metastatic brain-seeking breast cancer cells, but he has one project dedicated to finding biomarkers for early stages of pancreatic cancer.

Research targets early signs of pancreatic cancer

Since pancreatic cancer is usually diagnosed when it has developed into stage-three or stage-four cancer, it has a very high mortality rate.

“It is also a terribly under-funded area of research,” said Bush, which has limited the research needed to find clinical diagnostic techniques for early detection.

Under the leadership of Rowena Chu, a senior graduate student in Bush’s lab and a biology master’s candidate at CSU Fresno, the development over the past two years of secretome analyses (protein signatures secreted by the pancreatic cancer cells) for pancreatic cancer has reached a point where it can progress into its second phase.

Ultimately, Chu and her teammates on the project are trying to analyze and isolate specific soluble proteins and secretions from cultured cancer cells of the pancreas, called ductal cells, to find biomarkers that would indicate the early developments of pancreatic cancer.

In the first phase, Chu and her lab associates have been trying to establish in-vitro pancreactic ductal cell culture lines of acini, which are the glandular portions of the pancreas that secrete enzymes to help dissolve your food within the intestines. Development of this model system has allowed them to isolate specific proteins to determine whether or not they are indicators of pancreatic cancer.

Now that they have established their culture lines, they will be comparing them to primary cells from tumors that have been removed from patients with pancreatic cancer, to compare the secreted protein signatures or ‘secretome’ by the cells from cancer patients.

Once they have established a correlation between their culture line and that of primary cells from tumors of pancreatic cancer patients, they will then compare with that of pancreatic juices released from patients with pancreatic cancer.

The analysis of the pancreatic juices will allow Chu and her associates to develop a method that will allow physicians to test an individual for early pancreatic cancer, after obtaining a sample of the pancreatic juice through a procedure called endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP).

‘Community’ of researchers tireless

“Trying to find a translation from the lab to the clinic,” Bush said, should be the driver when it comes to biomedical research. Without this connection, it is nearly impossible to apply what has been done in the lab to actual practice.

Though the past two years have been exhausting for Chu and her team and the research is long from over, the benefits of the outcome outweigh the numerous nights of little sleep.

“I often feel there should be two of me,” said Chu. “But I always look at the bigger picture and keep in mind what I am here to do, which outweighs any drawbacks to the responsibilities I have in the lab.”

For David Wells, an undergraduate research assistant in Bush’s lab, working in the lab is not a daunting, but rather an environment where everyone is working together for a common goal.

“Everyone in the lab is very inviting,” said Wells, “We each have our own projects, but we are also learning about everyone else’s project at the same time. We work in a little learning community, and try to help each other out when we can.”

A nap in the sun

Campus life

Some members of the Fresno State community just can’t wait until Spring Break to get a little bit of relaxing in — this man decided to spend his Friday afternoon taking a nap on the concrete blocks outside the Henry Madden Library.

The evolution of the comic book

The Holocaust, September 11 attacks, Islamic Revolution, and gay and lesbian superheroes. These heavy-hitting topics are not what you would typically think of finding in a comic book.

As Bob Dylan sang in his 1964 album of the same name, “the times, they are a-changin.”

Comic books, trade paperbacks and graphic novels are three phrases that get thrown around heavily in the world of illustrated superheroes, with bubble thoughts of intriguing dialogue coming from their heads. Increasingly, these books are taking on heavier topics, while retaining the look and style of a comic book.

“The world today is more like a comic book world than ever before,” Steve Roberto, owner of 2nd Dimension Comics and Games in downtown Clovis, said, “Life is not viewed as black and white as it used to be. There are more gray areas,” Roberto said.

Roberto feels that the comic book can push the envelope when it comes to political and social issues in America.

Comic books vs. graphic novels

Comic books are mostly printed in single issues, usually on a monthly basis. They have connecting characters, story arcs, teams, team-ups, heroes, villains and reoccurring themes and messages.

Wwhen single issues of a story arc are brought together with one writer or a team of contributing writers and artists, they are bound together nicely in one concise, neat, bundled story. These are commonly called trade paperbacks or graphic novels.

Yet, Roberto, who knows comic books inside and out, said, “The words ‘graphic novel’ and ‘trade paperback’ are intertwined.”

Most independent comic book publishers will print graphic novels, but these stories can sometimes be in a stand-alone story, not related to any comic book series.

Enthusiasts praise novels’ storylines, not just art

“I feel the word ‘graphic novel’ is misleading,” Roberto said. The thing that bothers Roberto is that people don’t look at comics as a serious literary form, only as an art form.

For example, Roberto said more and more gay and lesbian characters and stories are included in comic books today.

Roberto believes that comic books are becoming more responsible. He said that comic books can hold up a mirror to society and be a reflection of society as a whole.

The question that is raised within the comic book industry is is art imitating life or is life imitating art?

Tyler Jost, 21, an avid comic book reader and frequent customer of Roberto’s comic book shop, said, “Everything goes into graphic novels eventually.”

Yet, Jost said, half the fun of collecting and reading comics is getting the individual books.

“You get to see your books grow in a sense,” Jost said. For Jost, it’s about the personal attachment and experience he gets when following characters and story arcs on a month-to-month basis.

Graphic novels address current issues other forms don’t

Dr. Samina Najmi, an assistant professor of English at Fresno State, teaches two courses involving graphic novels or graphic narratives as source material for the course, English 179, Multi-Ethnic U.S. Literature, and English 193T, Middle Eastern American Literature.

The two graphic novels she uses are Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood” and Art Spiegelman’s “In the Shadow of No Towers.”

“What I like about them is that they are an accessive, non-elitist genre,” Najmi said.

Najmi said she grew up on Betty and Veronica, an Archie comic book.

Some people consider a literary medium such as graphic novels or graphic narratives to be a lesser form compared to novels or other types of literature. “I think that’s changing,” Najmi said.

She has felt an academic shift in the last few years “that means something,” according to Dr. Najmi, more professors and instructors are using this accessible literary and art medium as a tool to teach.

“There was very little out there to address 9/11,” Najmi said. “It was a different political climate.” With Spiegleman’s “In the Shadow of No Towers,” Najmi finds a medium, “that speaks to the power of the graphic form.”

Najmi has heard strong reactions from students with Spiegelman’s work. Spiegelman’s other graphic novel, “Maus,” talks about the need to resist racial profiling, something that his parents went through during the Holocaust, because they were Jewish.

“Through teaching, I’ve gotten more visual myself,” Najmi said.

“Persepolis,” another graphic narrative in Najmi’s teaching canon, is an autobiographical account of the author’s life during the late 1970s Islamic Revolution in Iran, when the writer was 9 to 14 years of age.

“In some parts it really shocked me,” Najmi said. The advantage and appeal to students is they get a crash course of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in an atypical literary format.

Nick Clark, 28, currently reads both The Walking Dead and X-Men titles. “My favorite is The End League,” Clark said.

Clark thinks that writers always try to write what people are interested in. “Perfect example, is the Barack Obama Spiderman issue,” Clark said, “They definitely mirror what’s going on in the world.”

The perfect match

Rose Hennig finally finds a donor and gets her bone marrow transplant

Rose Hennig has finally found her perfect match—though they have never actually met.

She doesn’t know much about the person responsible for saving her life, only that he’s a 24-year-old with two tattoos.

Hennig, a 20-year-old Fresno State student, had thought her battle with a rare and sporadic form of non-Hodgkin’s Burkitt’s Lymphoma was finally over, having completed six months of intensive chemotherapy treatments in late July 2008.

She was eagerly anticipating a return to her life at Fresno State as a Kappa Alpha Theta sister and a member of the equestrian team, but by the end of September, the cancer returned.

And this time, chemotherapy could no longer be trusted to get the job done. Hennig would need a peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) transplant with a match from a bone marrow donor.

Willing donors hard to find

Her sister Kate had a 25 percent chance of being a match, but when those results came back negative, Hennig turned to the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) Registry.

“I had no idea how long it was going to take to find a match,” Hennig said. “It could take months. All I could do was try and stay positive.”

Three potential matches came through in December, but two of the potential donors declined. “I didn’t really think about it until people rejected me,” Hennig said. “I got really angry at first, but then I thought, it’s really their decision. They have a life, too.”

And when the last potential donor, who turned out to be a perfect match, accepted Hennig felt only relief.

“I was kind of shocked by how happy I was,” she said. “I had been trying to push it to the back of my mind, so I wouldn’t have to think about it.”

Bone marrow destroyed before transplant

After another week long chemo treatment at the Stanford Cancer Center, Hennig underwent 11 rounds of radiation to destroy the rest of her remaining bone marrow. “Honestly, I thought it was going to kill me,” she said. “It was probably the most difficult part, the radiation. I fainted the first day, and I’d never fainted before.”

The final few days of chemo were particularly brutal. “I was so much weaker after the radiation,” Hennig said. “It made the chemo that much harder. The effects were pretty dramatic, like it’s very classic to get these really nasty mouth sores that go all the way down your throat, into your stomach. Everybody gets that.”

She spent several weeks in an isolation chamber, in which visitors were required to get “all geared up” before entering the room, as Hennig’s immune system had been severely compromised in preparation for the transplant.

“The actual transplant goes really fast,” Hennig said, “only about 45 minutes. All of the stem cells are in this one bag.”

After the initial transplant, it takes about 100 days for the stem cells to grow and develop into a new blood system.

And Hennig is looking forward to that day.

“Once the 100 days are up, I can go outside without wearing a mask,” she said. “I can go more places. It’ll still be six months to a year before I can see my horse, though.”

Waiting to live the rest of her life

She also looks forward to the day she can return to Fresno State, to her sorority, and to the equestrian team. “Before any of this happened I was an undeclared major,” Hennig said, “but now I’m thinking about going into nursing, because I figure, who better to help people go through all of this than someone who’s been there already?”

Hennig celebrated her 21st birthday on March 29, surrounded by her family and two other bone marrow transplant (bmt) patients that she met at Stanford.

“I can’t really go buy alcohol yet, though,” she said, “because nobody would really be able to see me underneath my face mask. Maybe next year.”

For more information on becoming a marrow donor, please visit Marrow.org.

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