AUTISM FIRST STEPS
AUTISM DAILY NEWSLETTER
Sunday, November 25, 2001
INDEX:
* The Council for Exceptional Children Annual
Convention
* SUPPORT
FOR PARITY NEEDED NOW
* Honors
Roll In For Area Autistic Athlete; Receives Skating Award
* Deciphering Protein Evolution
* Online Petitions for Resolutions for Individuals
with Autism Spectrum
Disorders:
* Some
Other Online Petitions for Parents of Children with Special Needs.
******************************
The Council for Exceptional Children
Annual Convention
Scheduled
for NYC, NY April 3-6,2002.
I attended last years conventin in Kansas City
(About an hour from where I used to live) and it
was well worth the money. Although it
encompasses all areas of SPED, There are more
than enough sessions on Autism, MR, DSI, etc as
well as a fantastic expo with hundreds of
exhibitors - free samples, catalogs, great deals
on stuff exhibitors bring, etc. I even took my
son Ned (see my signature below for info) and he
loved the expo. He even helped on exhibitor sell
her product. /i plan on going up for at least
the expo, maybe more depending on our schedule.
www.cec.sped.org/nyc
******************************
SUPPORT FOR PARITY NEEDED NOW
Safe
& Healthy Families & Communities Advocates --
We can be grateful to our Senators Grassley and Harkin for helping pass the
full insurance parity legislation in the U.S. Senate on October 30.
Now comes the harder job of gaining passage in the House of Representatives.
THE COMING WEEK IS CRUCIAL -- we need to flood our Legislators'
email and
phone mail inboxes with urgent requests that they pass full mental health
parity legislation in 2001. IT IS A MATTER OF HUMAN DIGNITY, SIMPLE
FAIRNESS, AND ECONOMIC GOOD SENSE.
A quick and easy way to email Iowa Senators and Representatives is to go to
this address:
http://webslinger.com/jhoffman/state/ia
Listed there are all their email links, so you can just point and click and
type in your message. We find that we get just as many personal responses
from emails as from letters, and with the postal mails pausing for
irradiation these days, the word gets to Washington politicians much better
electronically. Or call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.
What to say? Remind GREG GANSKE that Iowans count on him for enlightened
national leadership in matters of health policy, and that this is an
election year. Let JIM NUSSLE know why we believe he is wrong to fail to
support his issue, that it is short-sighted fiscal conservatism. It is
NAMI's understanding that JIM LEACH intends to vote for parity -- let him
know that you expect and will appreciate his vote.
Urge LEONARD BOSWELL and TOM LATHAM to do the right thing.
Thank CHUCK GRASSLEY and TOM HARKIN for having done so. Harkin is
expected to be named to the House-Senate conference committee that will resolve
differences and send a final bill to the President for his signature, so he
will continue to need to count all the letters of support he can.
What to say?
That illnesses of the brain are as real as illnesses of the
heart or lungs
or any other body system are;
That discriminating against people with mental illness
bankrupts families
and places a tremendous burden on taxpayers;
That there is no scientific or medical justification for
insurance coverage
of mental illness to be on different terms and conditions than for other
diseases;
That parity is affordable according to the Congressional
Budget Office
estimates that it will increase insurance premiums less than 1% as has been
found true in numerous other studies.
Those are some of the facts that NAMI, the National Alliance for the
Mentally Ill, lists. For many more, search www.google.com for
"economics of
mental health parity."
Finally, here are a couple of ideas I've had to make things fairer if we
DON'T get parity in Iowa. (Iowa is among the 17 states that have NOT passed
mental health parity since the first federal parity law, the one that must
now be renewed as a permanent law, was passed.)
SILLY BUT FAIR IDEA #1 -- Since a basis for denying insurance coverage for
mental illness (and especially for substance abuse) is the belief that to
some degree it is the sufferer's fault, then we should deny care to all
those whose illnesses or injuries are in any way their own fault. That
would include those who smoked their way to lung cancer, didn't wear seat
belts, who overate themselves into diabetes or heart attacks, or who
suffered head injuries from not wearing motorcycle helmets, a practice
officially allowed by the State of Iowa.
STUPID BUT FAIR IDEA #2 --
Since we feel we cannot afford to provide insurance coverage for diseases of
all of our body systems, given the present financial state of our health
system, we should ration care systematically between systems, eliminating
them systematically one year at a time. As diseases of the brain have
been
covered by insurance inadequately or not at all to this point, we could
decide by lottery to eliminate care for another body system next year, for
instance cardio-vascular, another the next, perhaps pulmonary, etc., until
we resolve our health care dilemma.
Sometimes, it takes the absurd to point out the true.
PLEASE -- HOWEVER YOU WANT TO STATE THE CASE FOR PARITY, TAKE TIME TO DO THIS
NOW! The most meaningful way is surely with true stories -- the
powerful bipartisan sponsorship of Paul Wellstone, Minnesota Democrat, and
Pete Domenici, Colorado Republican, undoubtedly made a great impression on
the Senate -- Domenici has a daughter with Schizophrenia and Wellstone a
brother with severe Bipolar Affective Disorder.
Thank you for your advocacy, however it is stated and however
transmitted.
It is so important and counts for so much!
Polly Nichols
for the Coalition for Healthy & Safe Families & Communities
******************************
Honors Roll In For Area
Autistic Athlete; Receives Skating Award
[By Madeleine Mathias of The
Morning Call, Pennsylvania.]
http://www.mcall.com:80/news/local/all-b3_3autisticnov23.story?coll=all%2Dne
ws <-- address ends here.
Joni Talavera, 19, has been winning medals in
Special Olympics since
she was a young girl. But the honors she earned recently topped all the
others.
Joni, who is autistic, was voted the “Roller
Skater of the Year,” an
award given by the Pennsylvania Special Olympics at the Fall Festival held
at Villanova University.
When it was announced that Joni had been
selected for the “Skater of
the Year,” the excitement at the Villanova Skating Rink was overwhelming,
Louise Tusak, Bethlehem Special Olympics manager, said.
“When her name was announced it was chaos,” said
Tusak, recalling the
outpouring of cheers and applause from those attending the Olympics.
According to Tusak, local Olympic coaches can
nominate the person they
best feel rates the honor, “Skater of the Year.” “I did not know that the
Bethlehem coaches had submitted her name,” Tusak said.
She thanked the coaches for being so dedicated
to the program and
working so hard. She also lauded Joni’s parents who, she said, give her
wonderful family support.
Joni, who lives in Easton, was presented with a
plaque and two
bouquets of flowers. The Olympic officials read excerpts from a July 8
Morning Call profile of Joni, which detailed how she graduated from high
school in June even though she could not speak a word when she entered
kindergarten.
But Joni’s “Skater of the Year” honor was not
the only one she earned
at the Special Olympics. She won a gold medal for her performance in
artistic roller skating, Level 4.
She is the first skater in the state Special
Olympics to achieve Level
4, said Tusak. “Joni earned that level herself, by her total commitment to
the sport.”
To win the Level 4 gold, Joni had to do a
“triple” — three jumps, one
right after the other.
Her father, Joseph, said his daughter was the
only skater vying for
Level 4. “She went out there and did a good job,” he said. Joni also won
another medal — a silver in the solo dance category.
She also played roller hockey with the Special
Olympics Bethlehem
team, which captured the gold in a three-county competition. And in an
exhibition game, Joni’s team played against Villanova University’s ice hockey
players (who competed on roller skates). Joseph said the Bethlehem team played
very well. “They did not win, but they came close.”
“We are lucky to have Joni,” Tusak said. “Her
achievements have
brought a lot of honor to Bethlehem’s Special Olympics.” Joni practices
diligently two or three times a week at Skateaway in
Bethlehem Township.
At 10-months-old, she was diagnosed with autism,
a neurological-based
disability that thwarts most communication. When Joni entered kindergarten
at Tracy Elementary School in the Easton Area School District, she couldn’t
speak. She didn’t know how to laugh, but threw violent temper tantrums and
ripped off her clothes in the classroom.
But Joni’s parents, Maria and Joseph, never gave
up. They saw that the
third of their four daughters went to school, had tutors, was immersed in as
much education as possible — most of it with the help of Marge DeRenzis, a
Colonial Intermediate Unit 20 special education teacher who worked with the
child for 14 years.
Joni graduated June 19 with the Easton Area High
School Class of 2001.
Today she is a student at Northampton Community College, taking four courses in
her first semester — calculus, astronomy, basic English and critical
reading.
Copyright © 2001, The Morning Call
******************************
Deciphering Protein Evolution
Actin shares a common ancestor with a
bacterial protein
By Barry A. Palevitz
One of the enduring questions in biology is how eukaryotic cells arose from
prokaryotic ancestors at least 2 billion years ago. Besides differences in
genome organization, eukaryotic animals, plants, and fungi possess a much
higher degree of cellular compartmentation in the form of membrane bound
organelles than their distant bacterial and Archaean cousins. But how did such
a plethora of cellular domains, each with a discrete role in metabolism,
evolve?
To the extent that science proves anything, it answered the question for two
eukaryotic organelles a long time ago. Mitochondria and chloroplasts evolved
from endosymbiotic associations between an ancestral host cell and smaller
prokaryotic partners. In the case of chloroplasts, the symbiont was a
photosynthetic cyanobacterium; for mitochondria, most likely it was
ana-proteobacterium. The cytoplasm of eukaryotic cells is like chicken
soup-it's chock full of organelles suspended like chunks of assorted vegetables
and noodles in cytosolic broth. The broth also contains filaments of various
dimensions that collectively comprise the cell's cytoskeleton. Like the bones
of a large animal, the cytoskeleton provides a structural framework lending
shape to cells and against which enzymatic 'muscles' work to elicit movement.
That's how amoebae migrate, algae swim, stem cells divide, and cytoplasm
streams relentlessly up, down, and across plant cells. While the cytoskeleton
is as much a hallmark of eukaryoticity as any mitochondrion or chloroplast, the
origin of its filaments in deep time is more mysterious. Biologists assumed
that genes for cytoskeletal proteins arose from prokaryotic precursors, but
evidence in favor of the hypothesis was scarce, until recently.
Tubulin First on Stage
Microtubules comprise one component of the cytoskeleton
responsible for a variety of movements including mitosis and meiosis. The 25 nm
tubes consist of dimerica- and b-tubulin subunits that share about 40 percent
sequence homology. Another form,y-tubulin, functions in microtubule formation.
But where did microtubules come from? It now appears that tubulins share a
common ancestor with a protein called FtsZ, a key player in bacterial cell
division.1 FtsZ is also present in plants, where it functions in chloroplast
division,2 and a similar protein associates with mitochondria, at least in one
alga.3 FtsZ polymerizes into filaments in the test tube in a process dependent
on GTP. The same nucleotide is required for tubulin assembly into
microtubules.1 Tubulins and FtsZ are clearly related, judging from similarities
in three-dimensional structure. And although the proteins share only about 15
percent amino acid sequence identity overall, they're much more similar at the
local level, particularly at the domain responsible for binding and cleaving
GTP.4,5
Actin Into the Fold
Like the tubulins, actin-another essential component of the eukaryotic cytoskeleton-is
a globular protein that binds nucleotide, in this case ATP. As actin monomers
polymerize into 6-nm-wide microfilaments consisting of two helically wound
protofilaments, the ATP, situated in a deep enzymatic cleft between two halves
of the protein, hydrolyzes to ADP and inorganic phosphate.
It turns out that actin shares its ATPase domain with a family of proteins
including hexokinase, the enzymatic kick starter of glycolysis, and several
bacterial proteins. One of them is called MreB, a protein essential for
generating or maintaining the rod shape of many bacteria. By examining
structural similarities between eukaryotic actin and MreB from Thermotoga
maritima, a research team at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England
recently concluded that the two proteins are more closely related to each other
than to other members of the family and undoubtedly share a common ancestor.6
The group showed that the three-dimensional shapes of actin and MreB are so
similar they can be superimposed. The analogy with tubulin/FtsZ goes even
further. Both proteins share considerable amino acid homology at several key
sequences surrounding the ATP binding site, again situated deep in a cleft
between two halves of the folded polypeptide chain. Under the right conditions,
MreB polymerizes into protofilaments that pair up lengthwise. The protein
subunits are spaced about the same distance apart along the filaments as in
polymeric actin, but MreB double filaments aren't nearly as helical. The
similarity between MreB and actin doesn't stop at structure and sequence. In a
paper published earlier in 2001, a research group led by Jeffrey Errington at
the University of Oxford, U.K. visualized MreB in the rod shaped cells of Bacillus
subtilis using fluorescence and electron microscopy.7 MreB forms
filamentous bands that encircle the cell in low helices, like reinforcing
hoops. In an essay accompanying the Cambridge group's article, Duke University
cell biologist Harold Erickson calculated that each band contains 10
protofilaments.8 When Errington's team genetically deprived cells of functional
MreB, they became spherical. A search of genome databases showed that MreB is
present in bacteria with nonspherical shapes, including rods. It's absent in
spherical cocci. In other words, MreB has a cytoskeletal function. "I
think it is quite convincing that MreB is the actin progenitor," says
Erickson. "A key step, still unknown, going from bacteria to vertebrates
is to develop a mechanism to make the double-helical actin filament from the
single MreB protofilament structure."
More Acts to Follow
The story doesn't end with MreB; there's more to find out. Scientists want
to know if MreB is also present in eukaryotes-associated with mitochondria and
chloroplasts-as is FtsZ. According to Katherine Osteryoung, a plant biologist
at Michigan State University in East Lansing who identified two FtsZ genes in
the mustard plant Arabidopsis,2 "there's no obvious indication of
MreB in plants that I've found or am aware of."
Actin normally functions along with the motor enzyme myosin to produce cellular
motion, while microtubules utilize two other motor families called dynein and
kinesin related proteins. Researchers now wonder whether MreB and FtsZ work in
conjunction with bacterial motors. According to Erickson, "none have been
turned up in genetic screens for cell division (or other activities), and none
have been identified by sequence gazing. My bet is that kinesin and myosin
evolved in eukaryotes, after the evolution of microtubules and eukaryotic actin
filaments." Still, Osteryoung is pleased with the latest results: "To
someone interested in these issues, establishment of the prokaryotic origins of
two major eukaryotic cytoskeletal proteins is enormously satisfying. I look
forward to the day when evolutionary intermediates... from MreB to actin and
FtsZ to tubulin, perhaps awaiting discovery in some obscure and primitive
eukaryote, will more fully reveal the evolutionary steps by which key
components of the eukaryotic cytoskeleton acquired their present-day structures
and functions." Barry A. Palevitz (palevitz@dogwood.botany.uga.edu)
is a contributing editor for The Scientist.
References
1. H.P. Erickson, "FtsZ, a tubulin homologue in prokaryotic cell
division," Trends in Cell Biology, 7:362-7, 1997.
2. K.W. Osteryoung, "Organelle fission: Crossing the evolutionary
divide," Plant Physiology, 123:1213-6, 2000.
3. P.L. Beech et al., "Mitochondrial FtsZ in a chromophyte alga," Science,
287:1276-9, 2000.
4. E. Nogales et al., "Structure of the alpha-beta tubulin dimer by
electron crystallography," Nature, 391:199-203, 1998.
5. J. Lowe, L.A. Amos, "Crystal structure of the bacterial cell-division
protein FtsZ," Nature, 391:203-6, 1998.
6. F. Van den Ent et al., "Prokaryotic origin of the actin
cytoskeleton," Nature, 413:39-44, Sept. 2, 2001.
7. L.J.F. Jones et al., "Control of cell shape in bacteria: helical,
actin-like filaments in Bacillus subtilis," Cell, 104:913-22, 2001.
8. H.P. Erickson, "Evolution in bacteria," Nature, 413:30,
Sept. 6, 2001.
http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2001/nov/palevitz_p18_011126.html
*****************************
Online
Petitions for Resolutions for Individuals with
Autism Spectrum Disorders:
I
would like to notify you about several online petitions for parents of children
with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Would you please consider both signing the
petitions, and forwarding this message to those on to readers, groups, or copy
and paste and send on to friends.
The petitions are as follows:
US RESOLUTION 1
RESOLUTION ON FACILITATED COMMUNICATION
US RESOLUTION 2
RESOLUTION ON THE RIGHT TO COMMUNICATE
http://www.petitiononline.com/IAHRSRRC/petition.html
*******
US RESOLUTION 3
Action
Alert: Autism Spectrum Disorder Waiver
http://autismawakeninginia.bizland.com/autismawakeninglegislationactionalert/id3.html
*****
State Autism Ambassador Program
http://autismawakeninginia.bizland.com/unitedstatesautismambassador/
Peacefully,
LD Wedewer, United States Autism Ambassador
Iowa Autism Ambassador
Autism Council
Autism Awakening
AutismAwakening@aol.com
*****************************
Some Other Online Petitions for
Parents of Children with Special Needs.
I
would like to notify you about several online petitions for parents of children
with special needs.
Would you please consider both signing the petitions, and forwarding this
message to those on to readers.
The petitions are as follows:
"Resolution to Allow the Recording of IEP
Meetings for Students and Parents
of Students with Disabilities at
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/CROSS001/
"Resolution to Create a "No Attorney"
IEP Process within the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act" at
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/CROSS002/
"Resolution for Common Sense Regarding Discipline
and the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act" at http://www.PetitionOnline.com/CROSS003/
"Resolution to Create a "No Attorney"
Due Process Option within the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act" at
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/CROSS004/
"Resolution to Create a New Alternative to Due
Process Litigation within the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act" at
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/CROSS004/
Can you please help me spread the word about these petitions through parents or
others you may know or via your listserv? There is still time to make a
difference. Any help you could give would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Edmund H.Unterreiner, III
Missouri
******************************
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ALL INFORMATION,
DATA, AND MATERIAL CONTAINED, PRESENTED, OR PROVIDED HERE IS FOR GENERAL
INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED AS REFLECTING THE
KNOWLEDGE OR OPINIONS OF THE PUBLISHER, AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED OR INTENDED
AS PROVIDING MEDICAL OR LEGAL ADVICE. THE DECISION WHETHER OR NOT TO
VACCINATE IS AN IMPORTANT AND COMPLEX ISSUE AND SHOULD BE MADE BY YOU, AND YOU
ALONE, IN CONSULTATION WITH YOUR HEALTH CARE PROVIDER.