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Third Straight Bulldog to Win Prestigious Joint Award for ECAC Hockey and Hockey East Student-Athletes
NEW HAVEN, Conn. – Yale women's ice hockey captain Alyssa Zupon (Basking Ridge, N.J.), a senior forward, has been named the winner of the 2012-13 Sarah Devens Award. Given as a joint award between ECAC Hockey and Hockey East, the Devens Award is presented annually to a student-athlete who "demonstrates leadership and commitment both on and off the ice."
The award is named in honor of former Dartmouth ice hockey, field hockey and lacrosse captain Sarah Devens, who died in 1995 prior to her senior year of college. All female student-athletes in ECAC Hockey and Hockey East are eligible, and each conference submitted a league nominee for consideration.
Zupon is the 17th recipient of the Sarah Devens Award. Yale has had two other players win the award -- Jackee Snikeris '11 in 2011 and Aleca Hughes '12 in 2012.
Zupon has started a variety of community service initiatives during her time at Yale. That includes co-founding the charity "Hope for Tomorrow" for earthquake and tsunami relief in Japan. She is also working on a variety of ways to help patients with serious illnesses, particularly brain tumors. She co-founded the "Bulldog PAWS" (Pediatric Alliance With Student-athletes) program at Yale that pairs pediatric patients from Yale-New Haven Hospital with Yale athletic teams to serve as a support group. She is also currently researching the genetic causes of brain tumors. Zupon is pursuing a molecular, cellular and developmental biology BS intensive degree. The intensive track involves what amounts to doing a Master's level research project. She plans to go to medical school but hopes to spend next year working at a clinic in Indonesia.
Zupon's work on Hope for Tomorrow began after traveling to see the area in Japan devastated by the earthquake and tsunami in 2011. She and her mother, Shizuko, decided to do something to help those affected by the disaster. Along with a Japanese friend of her mother's, they founded "Hope for Tomorrow" as a registered non-profit organization with the goal of helping high school students in particular. To date, Hope for Tomorrow has raised approximately $150,000 and arranged for in-kind donations of items such as computers to assist in recovery efforts for Japanese high schools.
More importantly, the organization has found ways to help Japanese students hold on to their hopes and see a meaningful future full of opportunities. This was a component that Zupon added; the initial intent of the program was to provide financial support and equipment donations, but she recognized an opportunity to connect with the students on a personal level. Zupon, who is fluent in Japanese, is now the chairperson of North America Student Affairs for Hope for Tomorrow. One of her principal initiatives has been establishing a program to interact with the Japanese students. She and other volunteers in the United States engage in weekly reading and conversational groups with the students, connecting via Skype and the donated computers.
"The purpose of these interactions is to improve their English conversation skills and, ultimately, assure them that they are not alone and that they can still achieve their dreams despite hardship," said Zupon.
The program is already making a difference for the Japanese students.
"My dream was to work in the international field and travel to many different countries in the world," wrote one Hope for Tomorrow participant, Misa Ito. "But to tell you the truth, ever since the earthquake, I had given up my dream. We were in a chaotic situation and could not think of pursuing my dream. I even almost forgot how much I liked English. Ever since I joined the Skype session, and started to talk to Alyssa, I realized how fun it is to communicate with a person in a foreign country: how fascinating to know a different culture … Because of Alyssa, I started to feel again that I can achieve my dream if I work very hard."
Zupon has expanded the program, recruiting other Yale students and training them to engage with the Japanese students. Hope for Tomorrow also recently started sponsoring visits to the United States for students from Japan. Along with The Harvey School in Westchester, N.Y., Hope for Tomorrow sponsored two-week home stays and American school experiences for four Japanese students in the spring of 2012. Zupon coordinated a visit to Yale for those students, and she hopes to start a similar program with her own high school (The Pingry School in Martinsville, N.J.). This spring Horace Mann School in New York joined the program as well. Hope for Tomorrow sponsored a visit to America (and Yale, through Zupon) for six more students earlier this month. She has been tutoring some of these students for the past year.
In addition to her international relief efforts, Zupon has also been active on a local level. She has taken a multi-faceted approach to helping patients with serious illnesses while at Yale. In her sophomore year she co-founded the "Bulldog PAWS" program with the guidance of her faculty advisor, former Yale golfer David Gimbel '03. That program pairs pediatric patients from Yale-New Haven Hospital with Yale varsity athletic teams. Working closely with a former Yale football player who is now an assistant professor of neurosurgery (Dr. Michael DiLuna '98 MD '03), the Yale women's ice hockey team was the first team to "adopt" a patient -- a local girl named Giana, who was recovering from surgery for a brain tumor performed by Dr. DiLuna.
"Giana gained 23 big sisters and we gained an incredible, inspirational little sister," said Zupon.
Giana is now in her third year as a member of the team thanks to the program Zupon started.
"We have a relationship outside of hockey that can be described as 'big sister/little sister'," said Giana. "We are always in contact through phone calls, emails and texting. I can always talk to Alyssa about school and my illness and she always has an ear ready to listen. She comes to many school activities such as chorus concerts to cheer me on."
Giana, who has raised money for the Make-a-Wish Foundation of Connecticut and spoken at several public events about her illness to raise awareness, credits Zupon as an inspiration:
"I have watched several of my teammates participate in such efforts for various reasons and I know my involvement in wanting to help others has stemmed from the examples like those set by Alyssa Zupon."
Bulldog PAWS has expanded to include seven Yale teams, with a waiting list of more teams awaiting patients. Zupon is responsible for recruiting new teams, facilitating each "adoption" and planning events to aid the bonding between teams and patients. She also acts as a liaison between the hospital and the Yale Athletics community and maintains the program's Facebook page.
Zupon's work to help those with serious illnesses goes well beyond Bulldog PAWS; her medical research is aimed at finding ways to improve treatments for all patients with brain tumors. She spent this past summer in New Haven working as a laboratory associate in Yale-New Haven Hospital's neurosurgery department exploring genetic influences on cerebrovascular disease. She also spent the summer of 2011 in New Haven with that same department. She shadowed Dr. DiLuna, attended medical rounds and surgeries, and is listed as a contributing author for an article in the Journal of Neurosurgery that she worked on during that time ("Congenital os odontoideum arising from the secondary ossification center without prior fracture").
Zupon's academic and research work earned her the opportunity to work in the lab of Murat Gunel, the Nixdorff-German Professor of Neurosurgery at Yale. This prestigious lab, which is part of Yale's neurogenetics program, centers on gene discovery through cutting-edge molecular genetics, moving on to molecular biology and functional analysis of disease in order to design diagnostics and non-invasive novel treatments. Zupon is currently focusing on studying ependymomas, the third-most common pediatric brain tumor. Brain tumors are the leading cause of cancer death in children, and her research into the genetic causes of ependymomas will ultimately help create more effective therapies and improve the survival of patients. As part of her project, she is extracting DNA from blood and tumor samples and performing bioinformatical analysis of the results to find mutations of interest. She hopes to find and confirm mutations that may be responsible for the growth of these tumors.
Zupon has also been involved in two annual events that her team holds to help those with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. The Bulldogs work on these events in memory of Mandi, who passed away in April of 2011 after battling leukemia for more than two years. The Bulldogs play a "White Out for Mandi" fundraiser game at Ingalls Rink each season to raise money for the Mandi Schwartz Foundation, the charity started by Hughes. And every spring, Yale hosts the Mandi Schwartz Marrow Donor Registration Drive at Yale. The drives have added more than 3,000 potential marrow donors to the Be The Match registry, and located at least 17 genetic matches for patients with life-threatening illnesses who are in need of transplants. As a result of their efforts, the Yale women's ice hockey team earned the New Haven Register's "Sports Person of the Year" award for 2011. This year's drive occurs on Thursday from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at Commons.
As a member of the team, Zupon also participates in a number of community service events organized by the Yale Athletics Department, including the annual "Skate with the Players" at Ingalls Rink. Her team also takes part in the annual Relay for Life for the American Cancer Society (and raised the most money out of any group at Yale last year -- $6,040), the Holiday Gift Giving Drive and Yale Youth Days (where student-athletes play sports with children from nearby schools each fall and spring).
Zupon has also spent her summers doing things such as working as a counselor at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in New York for children with cancer and serious blood diseases (2010) and working as a resident assistant at Fellowship Village Nursing Facility (2009). From 2008 to 2011 she participated in five fundraising or site building projects with Habitat for Humanity, and from 2007 to 2011 she participated in multiple events for Special Olympics in New Haven and the Boys & Girls Club in Newark, N.J.
At Yale, Zupon has been appointed to the NCAA Student Athlete Advisory Committee and was selected to head the Community Service sub-committee. This is her second season with that group.
Zupon's work in the classroom has also been exceptional. She has a 3.55 cumulative grade-point average while taking classes in areas such as anthropology, biochemistry, calculus, cellular biology, molecular biology, inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, economics, English, genetics, Japanese, physics, political science, psychology and statistics. She is a three-time ECAC Hockey All-Academic Team selection.
Zupon has been a significant contributor on the ice throughout her Yale career. One of the team's best defensive forwards, she battled through injury to appear in all 116 games of her career. She totaled 38 career points on 15 goals and 23 assists.
In addition to winning the Devens Award this year, Zupon also won ECAC Hockey's Mandi Schwartz Award as the top student-athlete in the conference. She was a finalist for the 2013 BNY Mellon Wealth Management Hockey Humanitarian Award and a semifinalist for the 2013 Coach Wooden Citizenship Cup.
Sarah Devens Award Winners
1996-97 Kathryn Waldo, Northeastern
1997-98 Sarah Hood, Dartmouth
1998-99 Jaime Totten, Northeastern
1999-2000 Carrie Jokiel, New Hampshire
2000-01 Christina Sorbara, Brown
2001-02 Dianna Bell, Cornell
2002-03 Rachel Barrie, St. Lawrence
2003-04 Lindsay Charlebois, Harvard
2004-05 Nicole Corriero, Harvard
2005-06 Karen Thatcher, Providence
2006-07 Lindsay Williams, Clarkson
2007-08 Lizzie Keady, Princeton
2008-09 Marianna Locke, St. Lawrence
2009-10 Laura Gersten, Rensselaer
2010-11 Jackee Snikeris, Yale
2011-12 Aleca Hughes, Yale
2012-13 Alyssa Zupon, Yale
Report by Sam Rubin '95 (email@example.com), Yale Sports Publicity


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Patrol officers provide emergency police services within the city of Redmond 24-hours a day, every day. They respond to crimes in progress, criminal investigations and other emergency and non-emergency events. These officers are the most visible in the community and are assigned to one of four patrol districts in the city.
Traffic officers provide technical collision investigation, selective enforcement, traffic control, DUI enforcement and traffic safety education.
The K-9 Unit is a sub-unit of the Patrol Division and responds to calls related to alarms, prowls, robberies, and when a suspect is present and/or has fled. This Unit is a specialized team that locates suspects, evidence, and narcotics, not just for Redmond, but throughout King County.
Emergency Response Teams are specially trained units for specific situations. They are not full-time positions; training is in addition to regular job responsibilities.
The Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Team is an on-call unit trained for the most potentially serious incidents such as highly volatile situations, arrests of violent suspects, hostage situations, barricaded persons, and hazardous search warrants. The team provides a highly trained response force which emphasizes teamwork, safety, and precision.
The Crisis Negotiation Team is an on-call unit used to communicate with barricaded persons, hostage takers, mentally unstable individuals, and protest or activist groups. Both the SWAT and CNT teams work in partnership towards a peaceful outcome.
The Investigation Division consists of detectives whose primary responsibilities include the investigation of felony crimes and certain misdemeanor crimes. This consists of developing additional leads in an investigation, preparation and service of search warrants, surveillance, preparation of suspect composites, gathering and processing evidence, recovery of stolen property, arresting of suspects, and preparation of cases for presentation in court.
Crime analysts conduct research and analyze crime statistics for use in planning law enforcement activities and track crime patterns and trends. They publish crime maps and law enforcement bulletins on crimes of interest, wanted persons, and officer safety issues. They promote the exchange of crime information among regional law enforcement agencies.
The Family Violence Unit investigates spousal abuse, child abuse, and dangerous child behavior. This unit collaborates with community partners to intervene and stop the cycle family violence, support victims of domestic violence, and ensure at-risk youth and their families are immediately referred for a community-based needs assessment.
The Pro-Act Unit conducts undercover investigations to build cases against recidivist criminals who commit crimes related to auto theft, car prowl, burglary, and financial fraud. They assist with investigating serious crimes as needed to protect the community.
The Communications Unit operates out of the Dispatch Center, which is staffed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year (366 on leap year!). Dispatchers are responsible for receiving, screening, and prioritizing calls for service and orchestrating the appropriate response in an efficient and coordinated manner. This includes radio communication, telephone communication, computer and teletype communication, TTY communication, alarm monitoring, building access, and enhanced 911 system equipment.
The Records staff is responsible for records maintenance, processing documents, and communicating with the public. This includes processing case reports and citations, preparing documents for the prosecutor and court, and responding to requests from outside agencies and the public. Records personnel provide customer assistance for the public who visit the Public Safety Building. They coordinate and facilitate the authorization of Concealed Pistol Licenses, authorization of Gun Transfers, monthly statistical reports to the State, and public record dissemination.
The Recruitment and Training Division is responsible for the recruitment, selection, training, and record keeping of all commissioned and non-commissioned positions. Training curriculum is reviewed and modified to ensure that training is accomplished consistent with laws, public policy, agency accreditation, advisory bodies, and the department's mission.
Redmond Police Department is seeking lateral and entry-level applicants. Entry-level applicants: see www.publicsafetytesting.com; lateral applicants: see www.govjobstoday.com. For more information, please contact our Recruiting & Hiring Unit at firstname.lastname@example.com.
The Community Engagement Division coordinates School Resource Officers, Volunteers and all crime prevention material, programs, and classes and media relations. This team also works closely with the Block Watch Captain program.

subset: commoncrawl


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On the afternoon of October 7, 1987, Dr. Bonnie Dunbar nervously paced the sidewalk in front of 1301 McKinney.
Upstairs, in the offices of Fulbright & Jaworski, attorneys were putting the final touches on her application for patent protection of a specific protein clone that, when injected, inhibits fertility in certain mammals. The patent application --under the title, "Method of Preparation and Use for Zona Pellucida Antigens and Antibodies for Sterilization and Contraception" -- was the culmination of nearly 20 years of research by Dunbar, a professor of cell biology at Baylor College of Medicine.
If awarded, the patent would also boost the fortunes of Zonagen, Inc., a small biotechnology outfit formed in 1987 by Dunbar, Baylor and a group of investors that included Ross Perot and Lloyd Bentsen III, son of the former treasury secretary. The company hoped to market Dunbar's invention as a nonsurgical method of sterilizing dogs and cats. In the meantime, Zonagen would help Dunbar continue the pursuit of her life's work: the world's first contraceptive vaccine for humans.
As Dunbar's patent application was being prepared for shipment that afternoon, someone had overlooked a rather significant detail -- the actual clones, which had been isolated from a rabbit zona pellucida, the protein-rich shell that surrounds the ovarian egg of mammals. Dunbar called her laboratory and asked her technicians to package and deliver the clones to Fulbright & Jaworski.
As she awaited their arrival outside the law firm's offices, Dunbar was frantic. Many years, not to mention several million dollars' worth of painstaking scientific research, had gone into isolating these particular proteins. If something should happen to them, it would be like a death in the family.
"We were just desperate," Dunbar recalled recently. "We're lucky we didn't lose the whole deal, because if that shipment wouldn't have made it...."
As it happened, Bonnie Dunbar lost a great deal more that day, though it would be almost four years before she realized it. The clones did, in fact, survive their journey, and Dunbar was awarded a patent in February 1991. By then, however, the relationship between Dunbar and Zonagen's management team had collapsed, slowing progress on the animal sterilization vaccine.
In December 1991, Zonagen cut off funding to Dunbar's lab and severed its relationship with the scientist. Dunbar chalked it up to a learning experience and went back to her work on a human contraceptive vaccine.
Then, on January 20, 1993, Dunbar was working in her lab at Baylor when she received a telephone call from Joseph Podolski, Zonagen's president. Podolski demanded that Dunbar turn over all the files, laboratory notebooks and materials related to her vaccine research -- work she'd dedicated her life to since the early 1970s, largely with funding from the federal government and private foundations. When she refused, Podolski became angry and, according to Dunbar, threatened to ruin her career at Baylor.
"We own everything you have ever done and will ever do in connection with that technology," Podolski told her.
Podolski was right -- at least according to a series of agreements executed between Baylor College of Medicine and Zonagen in 1987 that gave the company exclusive rights to Dunbar's invention, as well as any subsequent research she performed on the zona pellucida.
Known as "technology transfer," such agreements have been common since 1980, when federal law began encouraging collaboration between the academic and business worlds to make scientific research available to the global marketplace. In exchange for the rights to develop the research, companies pay royalties or licensing fees that are typically divided between the university and the inventor.
Everyone's a winner when technology transfer works: Scientists and universities are rewarded for sharing their research, new businesses and jobs are created to develop and market new inventions, and the public is treated to such innovations as Retin-A and the nicotine patch.
Unfortunately, none of those things resulted from the transfer of Dunbar's contraceptive-vaccine technology to Zonagen, Inc. But this story is not simply about what happens when technology transfer doesn't work; that would imply that something relatively benign is to blame, such as the inevitable clash of values between profit-oriented businesspeople and altruistic, free-thinking scientists. If that were the case (and many times it is), the scientist would simply have been allowed to continue her research, and the businesspeople would have gone on to their next deal.
That's certainly been true of Zonagen. The company, which went public in 1993 with claims that a contraceptive vaccine was imminent, has generated considerable buzz on Wall Street with a "fast-acting, on-demand" impotence pill called Vasomax. Though the product has yet to receive approval for use in the United States, Zonagen has encouraged speculation that Vasomax could be the next Viagra, the impotence treatment that's become the fastest-selling drug ever. As a result, Zonagen stock has traded as high as $45 a share, and the company has a market capitalization of more than $226 million.
Bonnie Dunbar, on the other hand, never had a chance. Two of the city's most powerful institutions, Baylor College of Medicine and the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski, converged on a preeminent reproductive biologist, helped Zonagen take what it needed to start up a business and left Bonnie Dunbar's career in ruins.
Dunbar -- as well as those who consider Baylor one of the country's top medical schools -- might have expected something better, but the college's administrators treated her with shocking disregard. Simply put, they placed the interests of Zonagen, a company in which Baylor had a financial stake, ahead of the groundbreaking work being performed by a distinguished faculty member, while ignoring the college's mission as a nonprofit, research-intensive institution dedicated to healing.
Moreover, those same administrators arranged to have Baylor's patent attorney, Rosanne Goodman of Fulbright & Jaworski, represent Dunbar during negotiations with Zonagen. On the day Dunbar's patent application was filed, October 7, 1987, Goodman told Dunbar that she was required to execute an "Assignment Agreement" that would transfer rights to the zona pellucida technology to Baylor. However, Dunbar says, no one told her that Baylor did not plan to simply license her research to the company, as is typically the case with technology transfer, but to sell it outright in exchange for Zonagen stock.
Nor did anyone bother to inform Dunbar that all future research she did on the zona pellucida technology would be in the service of Zonagen, or not at all.
"I'm a scientist, not a lawyer or businessperson who might know the difference between a license and an assignment," Dunbar says. "My understanding was that, if something happened, the technology came back and I would be free to go on with my research."
That illusion was shattered when Dunbar received Podolski's phone call in January 1993. In the months that followed, Sam Crocker -- then general counsel at Baylor -- ordered Dunbar to give Zonagen all her research data, suggesting that her future employment at Baylor was at stake. The company moved her research data to its offices in The Woodlands; Dunbar was allowed to keep photocopies.
In May 1994, Dunbar sued Baylor, Fulbright & Jaworski and The Woodlands Venture Capital Company, Zonagen's primary financial backer, for fraud and conspiracy. The case was dismissed in December 1995 after a judge ruled that Dunbar had filed her suit beyond the statute of limitations deadline, a decision that gave Zonagen ownership of Dunbar's patent. That's when Dunbar cashed in the 114,000 shares of Zonagen stock she received when the company was formed to pay for her appeal, which is ongoing.
She has also sued Joe Podolski for defamation. Podolski has filed a counterclaim. Dunbar says the Zonagen president disparaged her work to justify his decision to halt funding to her lab, while simultaneously trying to take credit for her research. Meanwhile, Dunbar's laboratory at Baylor, once a bustling affair with 15 researchers, has been reduced to a two-person operation. Dunbar is also out of research money. She recently exhausted the last of a grant from the federal Agency for International Development, which has helped fund her zona pellucida research for more than 20 years. And for the first time since Dunbar arrived at Baylor in 1981, the school has been forced to pay most of her salary.
"It's just devastating," says Dunbar, who broke into tears on more than one occasion during a series of interviews on her Zonagen experience. "I think to myself, how can you work this hard and do all this good science and end up in a situation like this? I had all sorts of plans down the road for this research."
Perhaps Bonnie Dunbar wouldn't be quite so devastated if her invention was in the hands of a real biotech company, one that recognized her zona pellucida research for what it is -- the most important advance in population control since The Pill --and was capable of developing it into a contraceptive vaccine. At least then, one might say the greater good had been served.
But, without Dunbar's expertise, Zonagen has apparently made little progress, if any, on a vaccine. In the wake of its split with the inventor, the company hired some of her competitors, including two Wayne State University biologists. However, one of those scientists, Anthony Sacco, says neither he nor his colleague has done any work for Zonagen in some time. Moreover, a 1993 agreement between Zonagen and Schering AG, a German pharmaceutical company, to jointly develop and market a human vaccine was terminated in June. Schering was expected to invest $2.5 million in Zonagen, but bailed out when primate studies conducted by Podolski's staff failed to meet expectations.
Meanwhile, as Dunbar's groundbreaking science languishes in The Woodlands, Zonagen has shifted gears dramatically. The company's future -- and therefore, the future prospects of Dunbar's patent, which Zonagen owns until 2011 -- hinges on a 45-year-old generic drug Podolski claims is an effective treatment for impotence.
In 1994, Zonagen purchased an existing patent for the oral use of phentolamine, a discontinued hypertension medication, from a New York urologist. Over the next four years, the company poured almost all of its research and development money, more than $25 million, into a series of clinical trials to determine phentolamine's safety and efficacy. Last month, the company filed an application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval of Vasomax, a phentolamine-based pill Zonagen hopes will capture a piece of the market now dominated by Viagra, the enormously popular "erectile dysfunction" treatment introduced by Pfizer in April.
Whether Vasomax will ever put a nick in Viagra's market share is a matter of no small conjecture. The company was hit with more than a dozen lawsuits earlier this year from investors who claim Podolski and other Zonagen officials did not disclose the existence of scientific studies that suggest phentolamine is ineffective in treating impotence. The lawsuits were recently lumped together in a class-action suit that further alleges that Zonagen's key clinical trials, which supposedly produced "positive results," were run by consultants paid with company stock options.
Last September, Zonagen was sued by its former staff immunologist, Balbir Bhogal, who claims the company filed a fraudulent patent application for its "ImmuMax" compound (see sidebar). Bhogal alleges that ImmuMax is nothing more than a naturally occurring substance called chitosan, and that Zonagen's claim that it will enhance the body's immune response to a vaccine is already protected by existing patents. Bhogal's lawsuit spurred more legal action by investors, who complain that Zonagen did not reveal ImmuMax's potential patent problems when Zonagen sold 2.25 million shares of common stock in July 1997, an offering that raised $67.5 million.
Podolski says the investors' allegations are false and that he expects FDA approval of Vasomax by the end of the year. As for the complaints about ImmuMax, the Zonagen president describes Bhogal as a "disgruntled employee who is trying to sue us to get back-wages." Podolski defends Zonagen's patent application by pointing to a recent notice from the U.S Patent and Trade Office that, for now at least, grants some of the company's claims for ImmuMax.
"You can't patent chitosan," Podolski explains. "All you can do with chitosan is patent a use for it or a formulation of it. Our patent gives us a formulation, of which chitosan is one of the components. There is no patent fraud."
Likewise, Podolski, who has countersued Dunbar for defamation, dismisses any notion that Dunbar wasn't informed that Zonagen would own her technology after it was transferred to the company on December 31, 1987. That said, Podolski, a chemical engineer who came to Zonagen from NutraSweet, where he was in charge of the company's failed fat substitute Simplesse, seems to have little regard for that research.
He claims Dunbar's vaccine technology was not as far along as she had led the company to believe, and that in trying to "reproduce" her work, Zonagen's scientists encountered "flaws and other basic technical problems." For one thing, Podolski says, Dunbar's vaccine did not eliminate mating behavior, and therefore might not be a marketable alternative to spaying.
Podolski also claims that Dunbar's research on the zona pellucida was limited to the rabbit, which, he says, was not the "target." As a result, Zonagen "started cloning the dog and the cat and the cow." That kind of independent research gave the company confidence that the vaccine had "a real application for humans," Podolski claims, and made further collaboration with Dunbar unnecessary.
"In this lab, we've cloned about 15, 16, 17 genes from a variety of species, including all three human genes," Podolski says. "And we had separate patent applications for those. Now, that work pretty much hacked Bonnie off, because she views the zona pellucida as her life's work. That was part of the fallout between us and her."
What Podolski neglects to mention, however, is that the U.S. Patent and Trade Office rejected his applications as nothing more than an attempt to claim Dunbar's invention as his own. Patent examiners disallowed Podolski's claims, citing the prior art of Dunbar's 1991 patent.
"My patent was novel in that I was the first to do it with the strategies that were used," Dunbar explains. "It just so happened that the clones I isolated and describe in my patent were from a rabbit. All they did was try to claim every other animal for themselves. Nowadays, you can pay companies to do this. They call it 'clone-by-phone.' "
Podolski says Zonagen will continue to seek patent protection for several "new" zona pellucida DNA sequences identified by Jeff Harris, a company researcher. And he insists the loss of Dunbar's expertise has in no way hurt the company's chances to eventually market a contraceptive vaccine.
"There were things that needed to get done to turn it into product," Podolski says. "It's the difference between academia and business. We're not interested in a bunch of journal articles. You have to generate products, gotta generate cash flow or you're not a company."
That's an interesting statement, considering that almost 11 years after the formation of Zonagen, the company still has no products to sell. Nor has it produced a nickel of earnings for shareholders, while running up an accumulated operating deficit of nearly $40 million and counting. Zonagen has certainly been masterful at raising money, though. The company's secret is to hype the potential of its products right around the time it makes a pitch to investors for additional capital -- a tactic known on Wall Street as "pump and dump."
Zonagen discovered the value of this strategy before it ever sold its first share of public stock. A pro forma document dated June 1989 projected sales in the neighborhood of $50 million for an animal contraceptive vaccine by 1995. Not coincidentally, perhaps, at a June 13, 1989, meeting of Zonagen's board of directors, chief executive officer David McWilliams asked the company's original backers -- Martin Sutter of The Woodlands Venture Capital Company, Lloyd Bentsen III and H. Ross Perot --for an additional $350,000 in financing.
Three months later, McWilliams assured investors that the company's attempt to secure up to $5 million in permanent financing was simply "running behind schedule" -- oh, and by the way, we need another $230,000 to get us by. By the end of 1989, Zonagen's backers would pony up yet another $200,000 in "bridge" financing.
Podolski claims he saw a problem with Bonnie Dunbar's animal vaccine technology as far back as 1990. Did he warn potential investors? To the contrary, the prospectus that accompanied Zonagen's initial public offering of shares in March 1993 projected a "final product definition" for a dog sterilization vaccine by the end of the year. Zonagen's initial public offering raised $7.4 million. A month later, a research report prepared by Reich & Co., which acted as underwriter for Zonagen's initial public offering, urged investors to grab the company's stock while they could: "Zonagen's lead product candidate, an infertility vaccine, has the theoretical potential to become one of the world's largest-selling drugs at some time in the next decade," the report stated.
Similar exhortations from stock promoters helped Zonagen's stock price rise to $11 a share by the end of 1993.
"I told my customers that, if Ross Perot is in this, the man will not involve himself if there's nothing there," recalls Christine Hasslach, a former securities broker for Reich & Co. "There was Baylor College, there was Lloyd Bentsen. And a vaccine to prevent pregnancy? Fantastic! I thought, 'This is going to be the stock of the century.' "
Zonagen traded at around $10 a share throughout 1994, thanks in part to a $2.5 million investment from German pharmaceutical company Schering AG to help develop the vaccine. Podolski also initiated an aggressive public-relations campaign. One month, Zonagen announced the hiring of a "chief scientific adviser, female infertility," and used the opportunity to plug the company's "discoveries about the mammalian egg." Another release touted a collaborative effort in India to carry out a "large-scale primate study" to test the zona pellucida vaccine. In November 1994, Podolski announced that Zonagen had "cloned and characterized zona pellucida gene structures from a variety of mammals" -- the same claim that patent examiners would later reject because of Bonnie Dunbar's previous research.
In January 1995, Christine Hasslach met with Podolski and some investors. Hasslach, a Dutch immigrant with 15 years of experience as a broker, asked the Zonagen president about the contraceptive vaccine.
"He told me that they were going to have to start all over on the vaccine," recalls Hasslach. "He said Dr. Dunbar's work was sloppy, that the work was no good."
By then, of course, Bonnie Dunbar had sued Zonagen, and Podolski was already spinning a new story to investors. He had found his new product in early 1994 during a visit to Adrian Zorgniotti, a New York urologist, who owned a patent for oral phentolamine, a generic medication sometimes prescribed in conjunction with other substances as an injectable treatment for impotence.
Zorgniotti's patent involved phentolamine-soaked filter strips, which were stuck between the cheek and gum. The idea was that this method of delivery, called buccal administration, would eliminate the "first pass" effect and work rapidly enough to cause erections before the drug left the bloodstream. Zonagen paid Zorgniotti $100,000 for the patent in April 1994.
When Dunbar filed suit the following month, Zonagen put the contraceptive vaccine on the back burner and started pouring money into what it now calls "The Vasomax Solution."
That decision caused Christine Hasslach no small amount of trouble. By May 1995, Zonagen had only $1 million or so in cash, and its price per share had sunk to $3.38. Investors began filing complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission, claiming Hasslach had misled them about Zonagen's potential.
"When customers buy something, and it goes up, everything is fine," Hasslach says. "The stock comes down, it's a bad broker."
But Hasslach had a hard time explaining how a company with Ross Perot and Lloyd Bentsen behind it could have cash-flow problems. Hasslach also couldn't explain why, when Zonagen needed cash so badly, the company rejected a private stock offering she had arranged. Finally, in October 1995, Zonagen announced it had raised $5.3 million by selling 599,000 shares of preferred stock. Zonagen's original investors, The Woodlands Venture Capital Company and Perot's venture-capital firm, The Petrus Fund, picked up about 75,000 shares, which were later converted to common shares at rock-bottom prices.
"It's really hard to believe that the company had a financial crisis, and has to go down from $10 to $3.38 to raise $5 million, when all these big people are involved," Hasslach says.
By the time Zonagen's stock rebounded in 1996, Hasslach was out of a job and embroiled in a series of arbitration hearings with former clients, in which she had to prove she sold Zonagen's stock in good faith. All the judgments -- the final one just two weeks ago -- were in her favor.
"My clients felt I had betrayed them, but there was no reason not to believe that this company was not genuine," Hasslach recalls. "Whatever they said, they said in such a way that you believed them. I suffered Zonagen for the last three years. I lost my customers and I lost my credibility because of Zonagen. Who is going to give me the last three years of my life back?"
As its name suggests, Zonagen was, from its birth, inextricably linked to Bonnie Dunbar. Since the 1970s, Dunbar's research has focused on isolating certain proteins from the zona pellucida, the protective shell around the ovarian egg, that elicit an antibody response that prohibits conception.
And as Bonnie Dunbar's career suggests, no one else has come as close to developing a contraceptive that's as easy to use as getting a flu shot.
"Other scientists are doing this kind of work, of course," says Debra Wolgemuth, a New York molecular biologist and occasional research collaborator with Dunbar. "But there's simply no question that Bonnie is a true leader in that field, and has been for some time."
The daughter of a wheat farmer and a schoolteacher, Dunbar was raised in Colorado on ancestral land settled in 1862. An enthusiastic competitor in science fairs as far back as junior high school, she became hooked on reproductive science at the University of Colorado, after a classroom showing of the documentary Birth of the Red Kangaroo. At Colorado, Dunbar earned a master's degree in zoology, then began her doctorate work at the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution at the University of Miami Medical School, where she began her work on contraception by studying ways to neutralize the male sperm.
Dunbar later followed a mentor to the University of Tennessee, where, in 1977, her research took a critical turn when she discovered that one cause of infertility in women is an antibody attack on the zona pellucida. Her research was so novel it ended up on the cover of Science magazine.
For postdoctoral research at the University of California at Davis, Dunbar collected the raw material for her zona pellucida studies by driving 90 miles to a slaughterhouse, where she donned a hardhat and, for hours at a time, went from one pig carcass to another, collecting ovaries. It was the only way she could accumulate enough protein to conduct biochemical research on the zona pellucida.
"I had no money, and my department wouldn't pay for me to get this stuff any other way," she says. "It wasn't a pleasant job. I guess you could say that's where I paid my dues."
In 1978, Dunbar was hired by the Population Council of Rockefeller University in New York to begin work on a nonabortive, human contraceptive vaccine using animal models. The council had enough money to keep Dunbar out of the slaughterhouses, but there was still the matter of extracting the zona pellucida from the ovaries, a messy, time-consuming process. To simplify the task, she developed a machine that carefully sliced open the pig ovaries, then sifted through the millions of immature eggs, called oocytes, to separate them from the protein.
While in New York, Dunbar received the first of several grants from the National Institutes of Health and began injecting soluble zona pellucida into female mammals. That research led to the discovery that pig zona pellucida, when injected into rabbits, would bind to the rabbit's zona pellucida and create a kind of biological condom that would prevent sperm from fertilizing the egg.
"This was really the basis for the animal contraceptive vaccine," Dunbar says. "In every case, the rabbit ovaries shrunk up and there were no more oocytes. It was essentially the exact same thing as spaying. The animal became sterilized."
In 1981, as Dunbar was preparing to join the faculty of Baylor College of Medicine, a breakthrough in genetic engineering called "lambda gt11 library screening" gave researchers the ability to identify genetic information from a very small amount of protein. That meant Dunbar no longer needed to visit slaughterhouses or employ a machine to isolate zona pellucida proteins. She could now clone them -- which ensured that large enough quantities could be produced for commercial use.
As it happened, Baylor's cell biology department, chaired by National Academy of Sciences member Bert O'Malley, was on the cutting edge of genetic engineering by the time Dunbar arrived in November 1991. Suddenly, what once took Dunbar six years to accomplish -- the harvesting of sufficient zona pellucida proteins -- could be done in two days.
"In theory," she says, "you could make enough contraceptive vaccine to immunize the world in about a week."
While Dunbar was making strides toward a contraceptive vaccine, iconoclastic oilman George Mitchell, who built The Woodlands, was looking for ways to counteract the sharp downturn in oil prices. In 1983, he formed The Woodlands Venture Capital Company to back start-up companies involved in biotechnological and health-care services. By the following year, Congress had enacted a series of laws that encouraged the transfer of research from federal laboratories and state-owned universities to the private sector, while giving businesses the means to protect their investments through exclusive licensing and royalty agreements.
By the late 1980s, Mitchell's investment firm had taken advantage of the new laws, as well as the easy proximity to Texas Medical Center, to start a half-dozen companies. The first alliance with Baylor was Amnion, Inc., a high-tech holding company formed in cooperation with BCM Technologies, Baylor's for-profit technology-transfer subsidiary. Amnion was eventually bought by Cobe Laboratories of Lakewood, Colorado, for $12.6 million. Baylor received $1.5 million from the buyout.
While the Amnion deal illustrates how profitable the technology-transfer game can be, it's not always a good deal for the scientists. Dunbar and other Baylor researchers say those who agree to turn over their inventions for possible commercialization do so at their own risk.
John Langone, a biologist now working at the Food and Drug Administration, developed monoclonal antibodies that attack cancer caused by smoking. In the mid-1980s, he was approached by representatives of Oncos, Inc., a company that wanted to commercialize his technology. Even though BCM Technologies had been formed to handle the details of such proposals, Langone says the terms of the technology-transfer agreement with Oncos were never clear.
"It was an almost ad hoc kind of thing," Langone recalls. "There were not really any established policies with regard to who owned what or what kind of financial rewards or obligations there might be.
"I'll be extremely kind and say part of it was the fact they were just getting off the ground at the time, but instead of listening to the people who were very unhappy, they became very hard-nosed and just went about their business as they saw fit."
Langone says the financial arrangements that BCM Technologies negotiated on behalf of Baylor's scientists were "absolutely absurd." The school always seemed to receive a generous fee or royalty arrangement, he says, but the inventors who contributed the actual product or technology were often shortchanged.
"It seemed that the company would have to make a fortune before I got, like, pin money," he says. "I went into it thinking BCM Technologies was working in our best interest, but as time went by, it was apparent to me they were not. I thought Baylor would be working in our best interests, as well, but I don't believe that was so."
Langone's business relationship with Oncos collapsed when the company lost the cells needed to make the antibodies. Yet Langone, who wanted nothing to do with Oncos, was told he couldn't do business with any other company. Eventually, he says, Oncos went out of business and, though the cells were never found, "somebody else basically wound up with the rights to what we had done and we had no say in anything."
Another Baylor scientist, who did not want his name used for fear he'd lose his position, says he had to threaten a lawsuit to get back patents that BCM Technologies insisted were owned by the college. He says Baylor faculty are caught in a form of "intellectual slavery," in which scientists and researchers are expected to attract the grants that pay their salaries and fund their research, while the school skims 48 percent off the top of every grant for "overhead."
"Are these institutions really serving the public interest, or are they just trying to become big, well-heeled entities?" the scientist asks. "I no longer believe they are interested in science, only how much money it can bring in."
Steve Banks, president of the for-profit BCM Technologies, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview about Zonagen and technology transfer at Baylor. But the various attempts to commercialize Bonnie Dunbar's technology illustrate how the game of technology transfer is played at Baylor College of Medicine.
In 1984, American BioSystems, Inc., a subsidiary of 3M Corporation, approached Baylor with an offer to develop the contraceptive vaccine for use in household pets and cattle. A licensing agreement was struck between ABI and Baylor, but the partnership had problems right from the start: Equipment malfunctioned; blood samples were lost; study animals were mixed up. Dunbar remembers it as a "comedy of errors."
The matter turned serious, however, when, with the partnership falling apart, ABI tried to claim ownership of Dunbar's research. When ABI threatened to make a formal claim to the technology, Baylor sued. Fulbright & Jaworski handled the litigation for both Baylor and Dunbar, and reached a favorable settlement in 1988.
While that dispute played itself out, Phillips 66 came calling with a pitch to commercialize the zona pellucida technology. Dunbar even traveled to Phillips headquarters in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, but when she didn't hear back, she figured Phillips had dropped the proposal. In fact, Phillips was very much in the game.
According to documents Dunbar received during the discovery phase of her lawsuit, Baylor and Phillips were negotiating a joint venture agreement whereby the oil company would be given sole rights to develop and commercialize research of Baylor scientists. With Fulbright & Jaworski at the legal wheel, Baylor was even busy negotiating consulting agreements for its scientists -- without input from the scientists.
One such agreement was a draft of a five-year consulting contract between Dunbar and an entity called Analytics Ltd. Never executed, the agreement awarded quarterly royalty payments to Dunbar equal to 5 percent of net revenues the first year, and 2-1/2 percent thereafter. The rest of the contract contained the standard confidentiality and non-compete clauses, neither of which threatened Dunbar's ability to do research after the agreement expired.
The Baylor-Phillips partnership never happened, though, and in the summer of 1987, Martin Sutter, managing director of The Woodlands Venture Capital Company, came knocking with a proposal to commercialize Dunbar's technology. Sutter, Ross Perot, his daughter Nancy Perot Mulford and Triad Ventures, Ltd., a company owned by Lloyd Bentsen III, put up roughly $1 million in seed money. Sutter was named chairman of the new company, Zonagen, Inc., and began negotiating the transfer of Dunbar's technology with lawyers from Fulbright & Jaworski and Steve Banks of BCM Technologies.
The preliminary agreement, a term sheet dated August 3, 1987, was relatively straightforward: Dunbar and Baylor College of Medicine each received 27.5 percent ownership in the company; BCM Technologies was granted an additional 2.9 percent share for brokering the deal. The investors owned the balance of the new company, plus an exclusive license to any patents and trademarks resulting from the contraceptive technology.
Dunbar would also be named Zonagen's chief scientific adviser and, at her request, she was granted "reasonable attorneys' fees" to pay for the review of documents. Dunbar hired attorney Bob Hinton, who offered advice on the term sheet, as well as Dunbar's consulting agreement with Zonagen, a document that bore a striking resemblance to the unexecuted agreement proposed under the Baylor-Phillips venture.
That was the end of Hinton's involvement. Sutter had capped Dunbar's legal expenses at $3,000, and by the time Dunbar started preparing her patent application in early October, she already owed Hinton $2,950. This is noteworthy because the circumstances surrounding preparation of the patent documents are a key issue in Dunbar's lawsuit against Fulbright & Jaworski. The inventor says she and the Fulbright patent attorney, Rosanne Goodman, began drafting the application on October 5, after Dunbar learned that an article describing the zona pellucida vaccine was set to be published on October 8.
According to Dunbar, during the rush to get the patent application drafted and in the mail by October 7, Goodman produced a second document for Dunbar to sign. Called an "Assignment," it transferred all rights to the zona pellucida technology from the scientist to Baylor College of Medicine. When Dunbar asked Goodman why her invention needed to be assigned to Baylor, Goodman told her that Baylor's Policy on Patents and Inventions required it.
In December 1987, Dunbar was asked to sign yet another document, this one entitled "Assignment Agreement." It transferred the zona pellucida technology --whose definition within the document consisted of one-and-a-half pages of single-spaced legalese -- to Baylor, which then passed it on "for good and valuable consideration" to BCM Technologies. Finally, Zonagen received from BCM Technologies "all rights, title and interest throughout the world in the Technology."
In other words, while presuming to represent Bonnie Dunbar's interests, Fulbright & Jaworski and BCM Technologies gave the zona pellucida technology to Zonagen, making sure that, should the scientist and the company part ways, the vaccine would remain the property of Zonagen. Almost as troubling, Fulbright & Jaworski and BCM Technologies also gave to Zonagen any future claim Baylor College of Medicine might have to the research.
If anyone cared what that meant for Bonnie Dunbar's career --not to mention the prospects for a human contraceptive vaccine -- they haven't tried to rectify the situation. Baylor has made no effort, legal or otherwise, to retrieve Dunbar's research, nor does anyone at the college think it would do much good.
"In this case, the research was transferred for stock," says Dalton Tomlin, Baylor's general counsel (Sam Crocker, one of the architects of the Zonagen deal, retired two years ago). "Baylor doesn't have a string to pull it back, even if a company doesn't behave the way we wish that it did. I'm not suggesting that's true of Zonagen. It varies from start-up company to start-up company."
That might be true, says Mike Butler, Dunbar's attorney, but why this type of arrangement, with this particular company?
"There's no doubt in my mind that Sutter and everybody at Zonagen knew about the problems with the ABI deal," Butler says. "And somebody said, 'We don't want that to happen to us. If we're going to get into this technology, we're going to control it.' And that was the way they set it up -- without telling her that's what they were doing."
Looking back, Bonnie Dunbar now realizes that the beginning of the end of her ill-fated relationship with Zonagen was the hiring of Joe Podolski in 1989. Even now, she talks about what great possibilities Zonagen had; how, with the right management team, the company could be making a real contribution, which, in her admittedly naive opinion, is something more companies should aspire to.
Instead, under Podolski, Zonagen is a phantom company, a make-believe outfit that manufactures myths and stories for investors. How else to explain Zonagen's constant stream of press releases that hype Vasomax, whose relative ineffectiveness was revealed in June at the American Urological Association's annual meeting in San Diego?
According to data presented at the meeting, 51 percent of men who took 40 milligrams of Vasomax, the recommended dosage, were able to achieve intercourse, compared to 38 percent of men who took a placebo. By comparison, Pfizer reported a success rate of 70 percent during its trials of Viagra. And, if 38 percent of the men in Zonagen's study were able to perform intercourse using a sugar pill, then a 51 percent success rate is not that impressive.
Indeed, as Dunbar's attorney, Mike Butler, notes: "When you think about it, Bonnie's vaccine is potentially the most valuable thing Zonagen has."
Maybe Joe Podolski realized that at one point, maybe not. But it's difficult to give the benefit of the doubt to a guy who actually brags about taking advantage of loopholes in an inventor's patent application.
"Part of my prior experience is to look at technologies and find ways around them," Podolski said at one point during a recent interview. "This is if somebody else had a technology and we wanted to get to it. Well, now we have the technology."
Joe Podolski and Zonagen now have Bonnie Dunbar's technology. They didn't have to find some way around it, though. In fact, with Baylor College of Medicine on the lookout, they walked right in the front door and took it away from her.
If Dunbar can be blamed for anything, it's her failure to recognize sooner that she was getting screwed. But she refused to believe her employer wasn't on her side.
She couldn't believe that Sam Crocker, vice president of legal affairs, would follow Podolski's call with one to her department administrator, Marty Weick, the very next day. Even after she heard Weick's tape recording of the conversation, she couldn't believe Sam Crocker would subtly threaten her job simply because, "if we get into a situation that our scientists end up not being cooperative, we're going to be out of the business of setting up these companies and doing this stuff." Dunbar wouldn't have fingered Crocker as someone so misguided he would think Baylor College of Medicine's purpose in life was "doing this stuff."
Another true story about Sam Crocker that Dunbar didn't want to believe: In the summer of 1992, Dunbar was concerned about continuing the zona pellucida research. She called Crocker repeatedly, but the college's lawyer wouldn't call back. Finally, when he couldn't ignore her any longer, Crocker, an old man with a long history at Baylor College of Medicine, wrote her an excuse-laden letter, which he copied to Steve Banks at BCM Technologies, with a note at the bottom that said: "Howz about dis horseshit?"
Slowly, Bonnie Dunbar has accepted that the only chance she has of getting her career back is by suing Baylor College of Medicine, along with Zonagen and Fulbright & Jaworski. She doesn't want to do it, of course. She loves Baylor and has a high regard for her fellow scientists and researchers, whose work accounts for Baylor's reputation as one of the top medical schools in the country.
No doubt, Baylor's prestige would be significantly enhanced if Bonnie Dunbar perfected a human contraceptive vaccine while on the school's faculty. How close is she?
In 1995, Dunbar and Catherine VanderVoort, a biologist at the University of California at Davis, published results from a federally funded primate study that tested the effects of immunization with two distinct genetically engineered proteins isolated by Dunbar. One protein, called 75-kd ZP, had the desired effect of prohibiting sperm from binding to the zona pellucida, but interfered with the development of the primate's ovaries, as well as disrupting the ovarian cycle. However, the other protein, 55-kd ZP, worked without altering ovarian function, which, as the study concluded, "is desired for human immunocontraception."
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That could be the last significant zona pellucida study Bonnie Dunbar conducts for a while. She's out of research money, and her chances of attracting grants decrease with each year that Zonagen owns her work. One morning last week, a farmer in Australia called and asked Dunbar for help in controlling the local wildcat population.
"I had to tell him," Dunbar recalls, "that I can't do anything. I'm not doing any research right now.' "
E-mail Brian Wallstin at firstname.lastname@example.com.
For more materials related to this story, go to www.houstonpress.com.


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For the next five days, Shelby will be home to the young men playing in the American Legion World Series.
For the next five days, Shelby will be home to the young men playing in the American Legion World Series.
The players and coaches are hundreds � some thousands � of miles from home and their fan base. It is the job of the host groups to be cheering squads for the teams and make sure they have everything they need during their stay here.
�These hosts have been with us for the last two years and are very important for the success of the series,� Jim Horn, co-chairman of the Legion World Series executive committee, said in an email.
Of the eight host groups, four are churches.
�We feel as a church, it�s a way to introduce them to our faith,� said Joey White of Eastside Baptist. �We have anywhere from 15 to 50 volunteers that show up and support the team.�
White said being at the games to cheer the team is the most important job of a host group.
�It�s fun and can get hectic, based on how well they are doing and when they play,� White said. �We are blessed because we have a lot of volunteers in the church who support it and love doing it.�
Jared Pankhurst, pastor of Lily Baptist Church, said his church members have developed lasting relationships with the teams.
�This is our third year doing it and it�s been neat to see relationships made with people who are 1,000 miles away,� he said. �Eden Prairie was the first team we hosted, and they won the whole thing. They have kept in touch with them.�
He said during the tournament, two church members became mascots for Eden Prairie.
�Eden Prairie lost their first game, so a couple of guys started giving them pep talks,� he said. �They won the next game after that, so they kept on doing it. It�s been a lot of fun to see the church members come out and cheer on the kids who they have barely met. They sit with the parents and form relationships.�
Pankhurst said hosting a World Series Team is not only a ministry to team members, it is an outreach to the community.
�It�s about being able to be part of the fabric of the town,� he said. �It�s a positive thing for us and to give Christ a good name in the community.�
Forrest Hoppes of Elizabeth Baptist Church said they start developing relationships with the players on the bus ride from the Greenville, S.C., airport. Two years ago they were hosts to the team from Waipahu, Hawaii, and are looking forward to hosting this group again.
�We go to Greenville to pick them up and greet them in the baggage area,� he said. �We will be with them all the time. They have 24-7 access to us. If they have a medical problem, they will call us. We make sure they have vans, and we make sure they are apprised of everything they need to know.�
Hoppes said church members take their job seriously from beginning to end.
�We stood in the parking lot and waved goodbye to the team from Hawaii at 3 a.m.,� he said. �We love this hosting job.�
How far away?
Here�s a look at how far each team is traveling to the 2013 World Series:
Waipahu, Hawaii � 4,644 miles
Petaluma, Calif. � 2,697
Burnsville, Minn. � 1,139
Branford, Conn. � 752
Gonzales, La. � 731
Napoleon, Ohio � 610
Brooklawn , N.J. � 574
Wilmington � 248
American Legion World Series Host groups
Eastside Baptist
Elizabeth Baptist
First Baptist
Lily Baptist
Fellowship of Christian Athletes
Kiwanis Club
Breakfast Rotary Club
Lunch Rotary Club


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Project ABC is a collaborative partnership among professionals in child welfare, mental health and community services designed to create a system of care for young children in the Los Angeles County area who would benefit from mental health services. Our goal is to ensure that children from birth to 5 years have access to services that are family-centered, strength-based, and culturally competent.
Families are key partners in everything we do, and we are guided by the family voice and choice and the strengths of each family to plan and deliver services that will result in the best possible care for our children. As full partners, family members participate on teams that identify services and make decisions about how best to work with their own children, as well as helping to improve services for other families in their community.
Community-based, infant/early childhood mental health treatment programs provide families with needed services and supports when families identify challenges working through atypical behaviors in very young children or managing challenging family experiences.
Learn more about our services.


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Check Out More of the Challenges For Our Upcoming Billings Top Shot 2013
We are only three days away from our first ever Billings Top Shot competition! Don't worry if you haven't signed up yet, you can still register all the way up to Saturday morning.
Don't worry about bringing anything with you either! Townsquare Media and Three Sights Shooting Range will be providing everything you need for the competition. That includes guns, ammunition, and lunch for both Saturday and Sunday are on us!
Click below to find out what kind of challenges await you at Billings Top Shot 2013.
Cigarette Challenge
Shooters will be shooting at 2 cigarettes taped to a target placed at 20 feet. Shooters will get 4 rounds of 40 S&W (to be shot with a Smith & Wesson M&P 40) . Shooters will need to shoot the cigarette completely in half (two pieces). Each ciagarette split will be worth 1 point for a total of 2 possible points. Shooters will get 2 practice rounds to be shot at cigarettes outlined on a target.
Candle Flame Challenge
Shooters will need to shoot the flame off of a candle placed at 10 yards (30
feet). Shooters will get 3 rounds of 40 S&W (to be shot with the Springfield 5.25). Shoot the candle and you get no points. Shoot the flame for one point. Shooters will get 2 practice rounds to shoot at a candle drawn on a target.
Lollipop Challenge
Shooter will be shooting at 6 lollipops placed down range at 25 yards ( 75 feet) for a possible total of 6 points. Shooters will be shooting a Smith & Wesson AR15 with open sights while kneeling and using the bench for stability. Shooters will get 2 rounds to shoot at a zeroing target.
So as you can see our competitors have their work cut out for them this weekend! Does this sound like something you want to participate in?


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When the Gang of Four published its famous book on design patterns, it ushered a rage among serious developers to reconsider and even rewrite their programs using the newly named and illustrated techniques. While I maintained my usual skepticism about all things suddenly popular, I liked the ability to refer to a series of programming constructs with a single word. Today, if someone says "Proxy pattern," the phrase conveys a specific series of actions, done in a certain way, to achieve a specific goal. And by presenting 23 such patterns (a number that has struck me at various times as too few and too many), the GoF helped developers communicate implementation tactics simply. This linguistic aid also locked into the language terms that we now use routinely, but were little-used before the book except in specialized domains: singleton, iterator, decorator, and proxy object.
While the GoF book did a good job of explaining what the patterns were, it was far less helpful in explaining where and when to use them. Subsequent books (in order of my recommendation) emerged during the next decade to fill that gap: Joshua Kerievsky's Refactoring to Patterns, our columnist Allen Holub's Holub on Patterns, and Shalloway and Trott's Design Patterns Explained. For beginners, Head First Design Patterns from O'Reilly is a pleasant, somewhat goofy alternative.
The problem with the GoF book and other sources of information is that they don't sufficiently distinguish the important patterns from the ones you can safely leave behind. But now that we have 15 years of experience with these techniques, we have the benefit of hindsight and can see that some patterns are rarely used. (Let's face it, how many times are you likely to write an interpreter and consult the Interpreter pattern when you do so?)
There will be some quibbling among readers, I expect, but I think it's safe to say that the following patterns can be considered very much secondary: Bridge, Chain of Responsibility, Interpreter, Mediator, Memento, and Prototype. A pattern that is popular but whose use, in my opinion, should be restricted is the Singleton. It's a creational pattern that allows the developer to create one and only one instance of an object. It's most often condemned because the Singleton is generally implemented as a global variable, which is a practice long frowned upon. In my own practice, it's not so much the global part that's a problem, as it is that Singletons wreak havoc on testing. When you can build only one instance of an object, and so are denied access to a constructor, you find yourself constantly twisting your tests to get around the object's constraints. Eventually, you come to the inescapable conclusion: It is easier to create the items as a plain old object and limit yourself to creating one instance by pure discipline.
Another problem with most instruction on patterns is that the books read like catalogs of ready-made solutions that are illustrated using trivial examples. The result is that many developers and designers who would be inclined to favor patterns get lost in them. They don't fully understand them and, as in my case, tend not to see opportunities to use them. (Kerievsky's book is particularly useful with this problem.)
I've long felt it would be a lot easier to learn patterns in groups, not by function (which is the common way), but by usefulness. The most useful should be known intimately, the lesser used should be known well enough to be able to discuss them (even if implementation requires a quick refresher), and a final tier of patterns such as those I listed earlier can be postponed until relevant (although not forgotten completely).
In the first group of the most useful, I'd place Adapter, Command, Decorator, Façade, Factory/Abstract Factory, Observer, and Strategy. Your mileage may vary and you might include other patterns, but I doubt many readers would exclude any of these. I'd move the patterns not mentioned so far into the second group. And I'd move the least used patterns plus Singleton and Iterator into the last group. Singleton for completion's sake, since the pattern comes up frequently in writing and conversation. I'd put Iterator in the last group, too, because despite its constant use, most developers never have to actually implement iteration code. (Such is the widespread availability of good collections libraries.)
I expect that the greatest push-back will come from true believers who feel that good developers should know all 23 patterns thoroughly. I plain disagree. Interpreter is the perfect example of why all patterns need not be learned equally well. And even the deepest pattern aficionado, I trust, will agree that learning the most common patterns first makes a lot of sense.
Epilog: As an example that patterns are universal and not consigned exclusively to Java, C++, and Smalltalk, one of this week's features is on the Decorator pattern in JavaScript. If the term Decorator does not conjure up a specific technique...well, you have some extra reading to do.
— Andrew Binstock
Editor in Chief
[email protected]
Twitter: platypusguy


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Site owner Ken jumps for joy and raises over a grand for charity....
Ken will be reluctantly jumping from a perfectly good plane this weekend, in aid of Cancer Research UK...
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9:00am - First Service
10:00am - Grace Point Cafe
11:00am - Second Service (Focus Point)
11075 SW Gaarde St.
Tigard, OR 97224
(503) 639-3913
If you have any questions about any thing you have seen on our site, if we could be of assistance to you, or you would like to involve yourself in one of our ministries, please let us know. We are here for you!
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By ,
Published January 13, 2015
A Minnesota National Guard member and self-described commander of a militia group is accused of stealing classified information from his former military unit at Fort Bragg, N.C.
According to a federal affidavit obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, 25-year-old Keith Michael Novak stole names, Social Security numbers and clearance levels of roughly 400 members of the 82nd Airborne Division to make fake identities for his militia.
Documents also say Novak threatened violence if arrested.
Prosecutors say Novak served with the 82nd Airborne from 2009 to 2012.
Novak is in federal custody. His father's phone number is unlisted. The federal defender's office has been assigned the case, but an attorney has not been selected to represent him.
The guard and the Fort Bragg unit say they'll cooperate with the investigation.


text: AFT/IPL stands for Advanced Fluorescent Technology/Infrared Pulsed Light. It's not a laser; the AFT/IPL motion technology continuously hits the deep hair follicle tissue in a straight line at a low dose and high frequency. It is easily absorbed by the hair to decompose the hair papilla pigment and shrink the hair follicle tissue to impede hair growth and achieve effective and painless hair removal.


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The Biggest Holiday Challenges for Retailers and How to Prepare for the Rush
For small business and solo retailers, the holiday season presents some of the highest stakes and biggest challenges. Read these tips on how to prepare now.
Should You Use Crowdfunding to Help Finance Your Business?
Reward-based, equity and debt are all types of crowdfunding available to small businesses. Here are some tips that businesses can use to create a successful campaign.
Do You Have a 5-Year Plan for Your Business?
No matter how successful your business is now, developing a strategic plan for your business can help take your company to even greater heights.
Resources to Help You Create an Effective Employee Handbook
A small business has several resources available to help them put together a comprehensive employee handbook. Here are tips on how to get your employees read it, too.
Tax Time: A Guide to Completing the Schedule C
If you operate a sole proprietorship or single-member LLC, make sure you know how to complete the Schedule C Form.
Steel Your Small Business Against Employee Theft
Burglary or theft is the most common reason for small business insurance claims, accounting for 20% of all. In some cases, an employee turns out to be the culprit.
Female Entrepreneurs: How to Weave Your Authentic Story into Marketing
People purchase from brands that they know, like and trust. Here are three simple ways to weave your authentic story into your marketing strategy.
What Makes or Breaks a Successful Small Business?
What makes or breaks a successful small business? Here's a closer look at four things successful business owners do right—and one thing they need to do better.
Did You Miss the Fall 2018 Small Business Success Virtual Conference?
SCORE hosted our sixth Small Business Success Virtual Conference, a half-day event featuring nine webinars, mentoring sessions, resources and networking rooms.
A Guide to the S Corporation
Of all the business entities someone could form, the S corporation is likely the most widely misunderstood. Should you structure your business as an S Corp, C Corp or LLC?
Do Startup Entrepreneurs Really Need College Degrees?
Whether a college degree is necessary to start a business or a waste of time that could be better spent launching a startup has been hotly debated for decades.


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When we last saw Girls' Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) at the end of season one, she was sitting in the sand on Coney Island, eating wedding cake, and reflecting. Well, she made it home, thank God.
Season two begins in more gentrified areas of Brooklyn: Hannah's safe, sound, and sharing a bed with new roommate Elijah (Andrew Rannells), Shoshanna's (Zosia Mamet's) performing some sort of Shaman ritual on her apartment and praying something horrible happens to Ray (Alex Karpovsky.) And Marnie's (Allison Williams') boss is taking her out for a gossipy lunch and, oops, forgetting to fire her.
The really big news is that Hannah's now dating Sandy (played by Community's Donald Glover), but their relationship is complicated by poor, broken-legged Adam (Adam Driver), who's playing the emotionally-fragile-and-physically-incapacitated card to keep Hannah close. I know I'm supposed to feel bad for both of them (especially Hannah?) as she takes on pasta pot bedpan duty, but the only emotion I experience is lazy man's envy. Seriously, I would confine myself to an iron lung for six months if someone would occasionally bring me a magazine and a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I believe I'm not the only one, and I applaud my own bravery for saying it.
Hannah and Elijah's karaoke party is an awkward affair. Elijah's sugar daddy boyfriend George is drunk; Shoshanna fumbles through Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls," dutiful boyfriend Charlie (Christopher Abott) gets emasculated by his new girl, Audrey, while his old one, Marnie, looks on. Charlie is easily the character for whom I have the most empathy. My wife suggests it's because I have a crush on him, but I'm too busy wondering if my hair would look good styled like his—kind of an emo Kramer?—to even respond. (It so would.)
The ensuing scene is the Girls-iest in the entire episode: Marnie and Hannah discuss the state of their friendship while Hannah strips to her underwear. This is the immutable truth of Girls: The deepest convos happen when the fewest clothes are on. The only thing keeping them from having a Dr. Phil-level breakthrough is the fact that neither is squatting over a commode. The toilet chat thing is fascinating to guys, by the way. For us, a trip to the john is like a trip to the Vatican: No talking. No photographs. Just quiet reverence, please.
Ray and Shoshanna's Emoji conversation is awesome ("A panda next to a gun next to a wrapped gift… it makes no sense!"), but it's only half-true. Ladies, here's the secret: Your guy may not have Emoji on his iPhone, but he has stashed one deep in his text messages, and he stares at it when he's feeling blue and it makes him happy. There's also a 75 percent chance it's the smiling poop. We can't explain this.)
After that, things get crazy. For Elijah and Marnie, some Sarah McLachlan karaoke leads to an unexpected sexual encounter, and then drives Marnie to Charlie's door. Jessa and the delightfully goofy Thomas John return from their honeymoon, and Hannah, ignoring the pleas of a heartsick, stir crazy Adam, shows up at Sandy's place.
What happens next? It's hard to say. But she starts taking off her clothes, so we can assume they're either going to a) have sex or b) read The Fountainhead. Golden Globes all around!
For more musings from David, follow him on Twitter.


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Cisco compatible 1559.79 nm 1000BASE-DWDM GBIC
The DWDM-GBIC-59.79= is a Cisco compatible 1000BASE-DWDM GBIC 1559.79 nm transceiver module, for dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM).
Part Number :
Description :
A hot-swappable transceiver module, which allows changing between GBIC compatible modules without having to remove the system power. The DWDM GBIC solution allows you to provide Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel across your network.
Form Factor :
DWDM GBIC Transceiver
Wavelength :
1559.79 nm
Connector Type :
Dual SC/PC
Transceiver Type :
Data Rate :
1 Gbit/s
Height :
1.90 cm
Depth :
8.89 cm
Width :
3.91 cm
Notes :
DWDM technology allows multiple signals (each on a different wavelength) to be combined into a single signal, reducing the need for multiple fiber optic cables. There are 31 wavelengths available in the DWDM GBIC series (1530.33 nm - 1560.61 nm)
Compatibility :
Our DWDM-GBIC-59.79= has been designed to meet, and where possible exceed, the specifications set out by the equivalent Cisco part number.
Alternative :


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MPTrooper wrote:lordpunkmonk wrote:
MPT I mean seriously what do you think the whole FSM thing is?
do you just think we are a bunch of guys screwing around on the internet because we have nothing else to do? I mean we are protesting ID being taught in classrooms
I mean your a cool guy and all but I thought you would know why we were protesting something when you are part of the protest
I never claimed too seriously to be a member of FSM'ism. I simply wish to get a better picture of the thing we're all supposed to be protesting.
I'm really surprised at how lop sided things can get. In one post, I'm blasted because I don't care to read books by certain authors. Here I'm attacked because I want to study something no one else agrees with.
Seems kinds ironic to me.
Actually, were just surprised that you've been here so long, yet seem to not have grasped the basic premises behind ID.


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In August, Yammer CEO David Sacks raised a storm when he wrote on Facebook that "Silicon Valley as we know it may be coming to an end."
Since he'd just sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion, people paid close attention to his words.
There were too few ideas, Sacks argued, that had escaped the attention of the big Internet players, could be built for less than $5 million, and wouldn't get caught up in patent lawsuits.
But surprisingly, Sacks has kept investing in what most people would call Internet startups. This week, Fresh, a gadget-reviews site, revealed that Sacks was a major backer, as did Houzz, a marketplace for home-remodeling services, last month.
And last October, Sacks backed Twist, an app which alerts colleagues and family members when you're running late.
Here's how Sacks explained his investment in Twist to us: "Twist is at the intersection of the internet and physical world." It actually tracks your location and delivers a realistic estimate of how late you'll be to your next appointment. That, in his mind, made it a "new category" of app—unlike, say, traditional Web-based calendars which just send you reminders of appointments.
Fresh and Houzz have their own, er, twists on purely online models.
Fresh lets would-be reviewers sign up to get review units from manufacturers—and only lets them post reviews after they've received an item.
Houzz lets people assemble "ideabooks" for remodeling or redecorating their homes—and also find professionals who can turn those ideas into reality. The connections may happen online, but the work takes place in the physical world. (As with Twist, it didn't hurt that he was an enthusiastic user.)
So it turns out there are some ideas that fit Sacks's exacting requirements—more, perhaps, than he envisioned last August.
Sacks gave us some thoughts via Twitter:
@owenthomas Houzz is disrupting an industry, home design, that wasn't previously a technology category. That's why it fits my thesis. — David Sacks (@DavidSacks) February 5, 2013
@owenthomas I'm also not entirely thesis-driven. I try to "pay it forward" by investing in friends with interesting ideas who need my help. — David Sacks (@DavidSacks) February 5, 2013


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I was so moved by this subject that I stopped all the work I had been doing to write this article. I have sat and read forum after forum, posting after posting, for over a year now, by webmasters whose websites have fallen out of Google's front page results and now are mad, irate, crying, moaning, complaining, and thinking of suing a website that offers a free service.
I also happen to post to a few freelance websites for work, and lately I have seen nothing but link building projects. "I want 200 Google PR 9 one way back links that must stay there each month, use the keyword terms I want, linked to my index page. The linking page should have no more than 50 links. Willing to pay 25 cents a link."
Right, and people in hell want ice water, but I'm not selling. And you should not buy into the idea that lots of links to your website will get your website to the front pages of Google. Many "SEO experts" (I use the term loosely here) have spouted this mantra, and then run off to build link-building websites
Now, does anyone else see a bit of a set up here? Have you checked the prices on Patrick Gavin's website for a text link ad? Do you think he would say that links don't matter, and then try to sell you them? Does the fish man yell "smelly, rotten, fish for sale"? Of course not, but there is a fishy smell about the text link hawkers saying that links are the Holy Grail to profits or Google front page results for that matter.
{mospagebreak title=How Data Mining Works}
Time to toss the covers off the scam, but first a little history. Prior to immersing myself in search engine optimization and marketing, I was an investigator for a few large retail companies. I became involved with data mining in the mid 1980s, and began accessing the Internet at the same time.
Data mining was being developed in the retail industry for what was termed "exception reports." What these were, basically, was a listing of possible frauds being committed against the retailers by its own employees. These reports were run using ASP 400s and legacy software. This legacy software was a script developed to calculate averages of all the retail stores' financial activity. Once the averages were calculated and stored in the database, another script was designed to only mine data where the was an aberration above or below the average.
So, for example if 5,000 salespeople nationwide during the hours of 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM only rang an average of one return transaction per hour, anyone who rang three, four, or more in that same time hour could be a possible cause of internal loss. This was not, and is not, conclusive evidence to judge the offender guilty of a crime; it was more of a tool to stop the hemorrhaging caused by internal theft, a direction indicator so to speak.
You're probably thinking, "What does a bunch of employees who steal have to do with links to my website?"
{mospagebreak title=Data Manipulation}
Good question. Here's the answer. Every search engine robot is a script. It's not a real material thing one can see but a script, albeit one of over 100 parts, but still a script. Each search engine robot stores information about your website in its database. This is what is known as an index, and in it resides information useful to a search robot trying to determine who has a useful, resourceful website that complies with each search engine's quality guidelines. It also uses this information to determine which websites are trying to manipulate its search results index.
UH OH…It does what? It catches those webmasters who try to manipulate its database or results listings. It works very much like the scripts that catch retail employees stealing cash and merchandise from their employers. You might want to be sitting down to read this next part, since what I'm about to reveal will have a huge impact on the cheats in this industry, and on what may have happened to your website.
Google stores in its database a cache of your Web page at the time it indexed your website, along with a cache of your links. Now why would it store a cache of your links? Reasons include: seeing who you link to, seeing who links to you, and — this is important — seeing how many links a website builds over time, in relation to the amount of time it took the average authority site to build their links.
{mospagebreak title=What Happens When a Discrepancy is Spotted}
Can you guess what happens when Google determines the average authority site took a year to build 100 links, and it finds a website that built 200 or 300 links per month in the same category? It sees these websites as trying to influence Google's search results, and applies a penalty with a dampening filter. This is what might have happened to all those websites that have disappeared from Google's index of results alltogether. Next time you get a penalty, don't continue the practice you were using. It seems it failed.
For proof of this I used a few keyword terms. Under the keyword term "tax" the sites in the top 10 results on Google's free or organic results built 100 links per year on average. For the SEO experts (cough!) under the term "search engine optimization" the average amount of links built per year is between 600 and 700.
It should be said that there are some cases in which links have been attained quickly and which have not been deemed to be trying to influence the search reults. This is usually due to reasons such as tremendous growth, offline marketing, and client satisfaction. For these reasons, such sites may rise well above the average, and should be seen as a sign of their popularity as people link to the website.
There is a huge difference between the natural link building that was started in the mid 1990s and artificial link building done by the hucksters and hacks of the online search engine optimization experts of today. Just because many concur with an idea that is wrong does not mean one should follow blindly.
This is also a direct reflection of the SEO experts fees to optimize a website. Those of us who optimize a website to Google's front pages without link building can afford to charge thousands of dollars less than those firms who build links, which usually get their clients filtered. On average it takes 15 minutes to build a link. Four links per hour is typically charged at a rate of $50.00 per hour.
Save your money for a nice Pay-Per-Click campaign; it's safer and earns revenue. If you want to toss money at an SEO, I'll be glad to help you out of it, but I'm not an "expert."


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But my life really began in 1901 when I was hired as Michigan's head coach. I coached there until 1923, then again from 1925-1926. While in A2, I went 165-29-10, a winning percentage of .833, and won 6 national titles with nary a free tattoo given to any of my players.
After my coaching days were over, I stayed on at Michigan as AD until 1940.
Besides my kick-ass record, I invented the position of linebacker, co-created the first ever bowl game, the 1902 Rose Bowl, with then legendary UM athletic director Charles Baird, invented the fieldhouse concept that bears my name, and supervised the building of the first on-campus building dedicated to intramural sports so that frat guys could have a place to feel like athletes before going back to their houses and puking all weekend.
I also started the tradition of U-M coaches screwing over West Virginia. According to Wikipedia:
In October 1896, after his team lost three times to Lafayette in home games played on three different fields over the course of three days, Yost became a remarkable personification of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." He transferred in mid-season to join Coach Parke H. Davis' national championship team at Lafayette. Just a week after playing against Davis in West Virginia, Yost was playing for Davis in Lafayette's historic 6–4 win over the Penn Quakers.
The fortuitous timing of Yost's appearance on the Lafayette roster did not go unnoticed by Penn officials. They called it "the Yost affair." The Philadelphia Ledger quoted Yost as saying that he came to Lafayette only to play football. The fact that Yost appeared in a Lafayette uniform only once, in the Penn game, and that he returned to West Virginia within two weeks of the contest did not help appearances. He assured all concerned that he would return to Lafayette for at least three years of study. But 1897 found him no longer a student or a player, but a coach.