One thing certain about the flu is uncertainty, according to Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and a prominent authority on the spread of infectious disease.

The rise and rapid spread of H1N1 flu virus, known as swine flu, has kept Lipsitch busy in recent months. An expert in computer modeling of disease dynamics, Lipsitch has been part of a team advising federal officials on swine flu's likely behavior and the government's response to it.

In April, shortly after the flu hit the headlines, Lipsitch was called to Atlanta as an adviser to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For a week, he worked intensively with other advisers and officials there to provide analysis and perspective. He appreciated, he said, how difficult the job of health policymakers is in the early stages of a pandemic, when difficult decisions are being made on the basis of still-sketchy information about how dangerous and contagious a pathogen is.

'Academics have the ability to spend more time thinking about these questions than people who provide valuable services,' Lipsitch said. 'I felt frantic the whole time, but not nearly as frantic as the people who had to [make decisions] each day.'

Lipsitch kept in touch with officials in Atlanta after he returned to Boston through conference calls, at first daily and now weekly.

Last summer, as a member of the 2009 H1N1 Working Group of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, he helped draft an assessment of the federal government's handling of the swine flu outbreak so far. He gave it high marks, particularly for its flexibility.

Flexibility is key in handling an outbreak's beginning, he said. Because officials didn't know how dangerous H1N1 was, the initial response included fairly dramatic steps, such as closing schools if a case were diagnosed there. Those responses were dialed back as officials began to understand that, while contagious, H1N1 wasn't as deadly as past pandemic flus have been ' at least so far.

'People took it seriously and then scaled back as the nature of it was shown,' Lipsitch said. 'The response was well-tailored to cover the range of possibilities at any one time.'

Lipsitch was recently named the head of a new center at the Harvard School of Public Health designed to provide better information about disease outbreaks to public health officials and policymakers. The Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, which received a $10 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, will focus on mathematical modeling of seasonal infectious diseases such as the flu, on drug resistance, and on the best ways to allocate resources in interventions.

Lipsitch said that more people with such public health expertise are needed in the United States, so part of the center's mission will also be to educate a new generation of students in the discipline.

Lipsitch, who received his doctorate from Oxford University in 1995, has considerable experience to lend to the effort. Much of his study has focused on the pathogen that causes pneumonia, childhood ear infections, and meningitis, Streptococcus pneumoniae. He has evaluated how it spreads, how it is affected by interventions, and what the patterns of drug resistance are. He also worked on the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and has worked to better understand the 1918 Spanish flu that killed millions around the world.

With the Northern Hemisphere flu season looming with the pending of winter, Lipsitch said uncertainty remains about the nature of the flu's coming second round. Though H1N1 is so far not as severe as past flu epidemics, it is clear that some will die from the ailment, Lipsitch said. Vaccines, which are being rushed through development and distribution, will be available in October, but it takes time to administer the dose and more time for the body to develop immunity.

A new online journal developed by students at Harvard Law School (HLS) aims to shed light on the area of sports and entertainment law.

Students received approval for the Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law in August and will release the inaugural issue of the annual online publication in the spring of 2010. Within the next couple of years, the journal's founders hope to launch a printed version of the publication that will publish twice yearly.

Through a collection of scholarly essays and articles, the new publication, states its Web site, intends to 'provide the academic community, the sports and entertainment industries, and the broader legal profession with scholarly analysis and research related to the legal aspects of the sports and entertainment communities.'

'There are a lot of legal issues in this field and there aren't many scholarly outlets for the investigation of these issues,' said one of the journal's founders and its editor-in-chief, HLS student Ashwin Krishnan '05, J.D. '10. 'We want to explore this field in depth and treat it in a scholarly and rigorous fashion.'

Krishnan, who worked with the Boston Celtics during the 2008-09 academic year, noted that there is enthusiasm on the part of both students and faculty for the new journal as well as a need for it to fill an important academic hole.

'There was no journal at a school like Harvard, and we felt like we could really come in and be the leader in this field as a top-tier law school in this space.'

The journal represents a growing interest in the field on the HLS campus.

The discipline was the original domain of Paul C. Weiler, Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law Emeritus, whom Krishnan refers to as 'the godfather of sports law.' But since 2007, visiting lecturer on sports law Peter Carfagna, who studied with Weiler while a student at HLS, has taken the mantle, introducing a series of courses for students and clinical placements with professional sports teams and leagues, as well as independent writing projects.

Carfagna serves as the journal's faculty adviser and is ideally suited for the role. He was chief legal officer/general counsel of International Management Group ' one of the nation's top sports management and representation firms ' for more than 10 years, and currently heads his own private practice in sports law.

Carfagna's new courses in the Law School's curriculum include this fall's 'Sports and the Law: Examining the Legal History and Evolution of America’s Three 'Major League' Sports: MLB, NFL, and MBA,' and 'Sports and the Law: Representing the Professional Athlete,' which he will teach in the 2010 winter term.

He noted that the area of sports and entertainment law intersects with a number of other important legal topics.

'There are all sorts of [issues] ... that require serious academic consideration because the courts are going to listen to what publications like this journal have to say about where they should go next in these areas that intersect sports law but really define substantive areas like intellectual property, publicity rights, antitrust, and collective bargaining-related issues.'

Sports and entertainment law 'really needs serious scholarship from a place like Harvard,' added Carfagna. 'I think Harvard can put its indelible stamp on the area.'

Krishnan and his fellow journal founders, Josh Podoll, J.D. '11 and Ryan Gauthier, J.D. '10, are not only developing the first issue of the journal, but also hoping to ensure the longevity of the publication by involving first- and second-year HLS students in the project who can step into management roles when the original team graduates.

'Everything that we do with this journal,' said Krishnan, 'is looking toward the long term as well.'

The journal will accept articles, essays, book reviews, notes, and comments regarding legal and/or public policy issues related to the field. For more information on submissions, visit http://harvardjsel.com/submissions/.

Jack Szostak, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), has won the 2009 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for pioneering work in the discovery of telomerase, an enzyme that protects chromosomes from degrading.

The work not only revealed a key cellular function, it also illuminated processes involved in disease and aging.

Szostak called the prize 'the highest scientific honor' and thanked his co-winners and collaborators, Elizabeth H. Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, and Carol W. Greider of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

'It started off as work on a very basic question that has turned out, to our delight and surprise, to have much broader implications,' Szostak said.

The three won the prize for work conducted during the 1980s to discover and understand the operation of telomerase, an enzyme that forms protective caps called telomeres on the ends of chromosomes.

Subsequent research has shown that telomerase and telomeres hold key roles in cell aging and death and also play a part in the aging of the entire organism. Research has also shown that cancer cells have increased telomerase activity, protecting them from death.

Harvard President Drew Faust congratulated Szostak, saying his achievement highlights the importance of basic scientific research, which may not have an apparent practical application when it is conducted.

'I congratulate Jack Szostak and his colleagues on this singular honor,' Faust said. 'Their work has not only shed light on the central scientific issues of aging and disease, it also clearly illustrated the importance of unfettered basic research.”

Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier said the work highlights not just the importance of basic research, but also that of the ongoing collaboration between the University and its hospitals ' in this case, Harvard Medical School's Department of Genetics and MGH's Department of Molecular Biology, where Szostak holds appointments.

'These two units have worked together in tremendous and beautiful synergy, scientifically, for so many years, and have been a breeding ground for so many scientific breakthroughs, including those being recognized today,' Flier said. 'The things [Szostak] did to understand how yeast cells work are now leading to what we think are going to be important breakthroughs in therapies for cancer, approaches to aging, and [important in] many other human diseases.'

MGH President Peter Slavin said the hospital was 'thrilled and honored' to learn of Szostak's award and thanked him for his contributions to biomedical research and for advancing the understanding of human biology and disease.

Robert Kingston, chief of MGH's Department of Molecular Biology, called Szostak 'a scientist's scientist' with an 'absolutely remarkable record of scientific achievement.'

'Jack is among a handful of the most respected scientists in the field,' Kingston said. 'He's immensely, immensely deserving of this recognition.'

In addition to being a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, Szostak is the Alex Rich Distinguished Investigator in the MGH Department of Molecular Biology, a member of MGH's Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Szostak's day began at 4:45 a.m. with a phone call from the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, which awards the prize. By midday, he said, his phone still hadn't stopped ringing.

Later Monday, Szostak missed the introductory biochemistry class he was scheduled to teach and appeared instead at a news conference at Massachusetts General Hospital's Simches Research Center. He entered the room, beaming, to a standing ovation by colleagues from the hospital.

Matthew Powner, a postdoctoral fellow in Szostak's laboratory on the building's seventh floor, said he and the rest of the lab were excited for Szostak. The lab was decorated with congratulatory notes, ribbons, and gold balloons.

'I think it's fantastic news,' Powner said.

Telomeres' existence was hypothesized in the 1930s after scientists observed that, though the ends of normal chromosomes never fuse with each other, the ends of chromosome fragments do. In 1980, Szostak began collaborating with Blackburn. Together they showed that repeated nucleotide sequences found in telomeres of a single-celled protozoan also worked to protect chromosomes in yeast cells, illustrating they had discovered something very basic that worked in a wide range of creatures.

Blackburn and Greider went on to isolate telomerase, while Szostak identified a protein essential for maintaining telomeres in yeast, which turned out to be a key component of the enzyme. His work showed that the inability to add nucleotide repeats to chromosomes led to telomere shortening and eventually cell death. This was the first link between the molecular biology of telomeres and cellular senescence, the aging and death of cells.

Although this work was not known to be relevant to human disease when carried out in the 1980s, subsequent studies of telomeres and telomerase in human cells have shown that the enzyme plays crucial roles in both cancer and aging.

Since his work on telomeres and telomerase, Szostak has shifted focus. Today he is exploring the very beginnings of life, focusing on how the first cells were created. He is co-director of Harvard's Origins of Life Initiative.

With Szostak's award, 44 current and former Harvard faculty members have been recipients of Nobel Prizes for wide-ranging work, including the tissue culture breakthrough that led to the creation of the polio vaccine, negotiations that led to an armistice in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the first description of the structure of DNA, pioneering procedures for organ transplants, and the development of Gross National Product as a measure of national economic change.

The most recent Harvard faculty member to win a Nobel Prize was in 2005, when physicist Roy Glauber received the physics Nobel for work on the nature and behavior of light and Thomas Schelling won in economics for work on conflict and cooperation in game theory. Previous winners this decade include Linda Buck, in physiology or medicine in 2004, Richard Giacconi, in physics in 2002, and A. Michael Spence, in economics in 2001.