Local News
New Pride Calgary Board Elected
November 21, 2005
After Pride Calgary’s heated AGM, the new directors of the Pride Board were elected as follows:
Tamrin Hildebrandt - Co-Chair
John Skorka - Co-Chair
Scott Middleton - Treasurer
Cherisse Dye - Secretary
Kaitlyn S.C. Hatch - Member
Eric Jackson - Member
Tyler Cranston - Member
Greg Spiess - Member
Richard Kerton - Member
Linda Craig - Member
Male Co-Chair John Skorka commented “Gay Pride is very much a part of who we are as a community. It’s about Unity and Love, Family and Friends, Diversity, Culture and History of where it started with Stonewall. I’m very happy and proud to be part of Pride Calgary and consider it an honor to represent the Gay Community. It’s wonderful to see lots of new faces on the Board with positive energy and fresh ideas. I look forward to an exciting and challenging year as Co-Chair.”
National News
Harper wants to Re-Open marriage debate;
2/3 of Canadians say the issue is settled
Ottawa, November 29, 2005
Received from Egale Canada
On this first day of the election campaign, Stephen Harper told reporters that he intends to re-open the issue of equal marriage for same-sex couples. He said that if elected Prime Minister he will introduce legislation to exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage. He added he will put it to a free vote and will not annul the marriages of the thousands of same-sex couples who’ve gotten legally married in the last 2 1/2 years.
“Canadians debated equal marriage for 2 1/2 years and they don’t want to re-open the debate,” said Gilles Marchildon, Executive Director of Egale. “Canadians have moved on. They want a leader who will unite our country, not divide it. Why does Mr. Harper refuse to let this go?”
An Environics poll released yesterday by CBC stated that 66 per cent of Canadians say the issue of same-sex marriage is settled and should not be addressed again.
“Canadians want Parliament to deal with pressing issues like health care, education and the environment,” added Mr. Marchildon. “They don’t want Parliament to spend time debating something that’s already been settled, both by the courts and by Parliament itself.”
“Mr. Harper was unhappy with what the courts said, so he criticized them and said only Parliament could decide,” said Laurie Arron, Director of Advocacy of Egale. “Parliament has decided yet he wants another kick at the can. When is he going to let this issue rest?”
“Making this statement on the first day of the campaign suggests that not only does Mr. Harper want to re-open this debate, but he wants to make it his top priority,” added Mr. Arron.
Friday, November 30, Dr. Ralph Reed, a leader of the family values movement in the United States, addressed a group in Toronto at a conference organized by the Institute for Canadian Values. As noted by that group, “Dr. Reed helped George Bush win the Presidency.” The Institute for Canadian Values was set up earlier this year to try and reverse the equal marriage law.
This conference is intended to politically mobilize those most opposed to equal marriage. A November 11 e-mail from Joseph Ben-Ami, Executive Director of the Institute, stated “We are all frustrated with the corruption of the Canadian government and its extremist agenda of redefining marriage... The Embrace Democracy Conference will train and equip you to have the competitive edge in the coming election.”
Egale Canada advances equality and justice for LGBT people, and their families, across Canada. Founded in 1986, Egale has over 4,000 members including people in each and every province and territory of Canada. Its work includes political action, legal interventions and public education and awareness.
For more information:
Gilles Marchildon, (613) 230-1043 (w), (613) 864-1133 (c)
Laurie Arron, (416) 839-7178 (c)
World Community Grid launches FightAIDS@Home
AIDS is perhaps the most devastating epidemic of our time. Approximately 42 million people around the world are living with HIV or AIDS, and just under 14,000 new cases of HIV infections occur every single day. About 95 percent of all AIDS cases occur in the world’s poorest countries; its growing impact on the developing nations of the world is both tragic and destabilizing.
Currently, there is no cure in sight, only treatment with a variety of drugs. The development of effective, inexpensive and robust therapies against HIV, the causative agent of AIDS, has the potential to reverse the downward health and economic impacts of this epidemic.
In an effort to discover therapies that will treat AIDS, World Community Grid announced on November 21st that it would run FightAIDS@Home, as the second project to take advantage of the computer power of World Community Grid.
FightAIDS@Home is sponsored by The Scripps Research Institute, which is studying computational ways to design new anti-HIV drugs based on molecular structure. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that the function of a molecule — a substance made up of many atoms — is related to its three-dimensional shape. Scripps’ target is HIV protease (“pro-tee-ace”), a key molecular machine of the virus that when blocked stops the virus from maturing. These blockers, known as “protease inhibitors,” are thus a way of avoiding the onset of AIDS and prolonging life. Scripps is using computational methods to identify new candidate drugs that have the right shape and chemical characteristics to block HIV protease. This general approach is called “Structure-Based Drug Design,” and according to the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, it has already had a dramatic effect on the lives of people living with AIDS.
Even more challenging, HIV is a “sloppy copier,” so it is constantly evolving new variants, some of which are resistant to current drugs. It is therefore vital that scientists continue their search for new and better drugs to combat this moving target.
While scientists are able to determine by experiment the shapes of a protein and of a drug separately, they are not always able to do so for the two together. If scientists knew how a drug molecule fit inside the active site of its target protein, chemists could see how they could design even better drugs that would be more potent than existing drugs.
“The computational challenges in approaching this problem are the vast number of possible mutations that may occur, and the huge number of possible chemical compounds that might be tested against them,” said Dr. Arthur J. Olson, Anderson Research Chair Professor, Department of Molecular Biology at the Scripps Research Institute. “The new World Community Grid project will run millions upon millions of docking computations to evaluate potential interactions between compounds and mutant viral proteins.”
World Community Grid’s FightAIDS@Home project runs a software program called AutoDock, which was developed in Dr. Olson’s laboratory. AutoDock is a suite of tools that predicts how small molecules, such as drug candidates, might bind or “dock” to a receptor of known 3D structure. AutoDock is used on World Community Grid to dock large numbers of different small molecules to HIV protease, so the best molecules can be found computationally, selected and tested in the laboratory for efficacy against the virus, HIV.
“There is ... an important need to improve existing drugs and develop new therapies that have fewer side effects, are less vulnerable to mutation, longer lasting and have a higher efficacy against HIV,” said Dr Sibusiso Sibisi, President and CEO of South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). “The goals of the World Community Grid project on FightAIDS@Home are therefore widely acclaimed. For South Africa, which has a high number of HIV-infected persons, the potential outcomes of the project are very relevant and necessary.”
For more information to join this project goto, http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org
