Friday Apr 10, 2015

Disease does not Recognize Boundaries: Improving Animal Health and Human Opportunity across Species and Around the World.

Bryan Slinker

Dean, Department of Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience Washington State University

Scribe: Bob McKorkle Introduced by: Kit Bowerman

President Elect Paul Chapman filling in for President Wendi brought the meeting to order.

Invocation& pledge: The meeting started with Jim Gordon giving the invocation and leading the pledge.

Introduction of visitors and guests: Scott Sadler did the greetings in typical BBRC style.

Steve Peters, committee chair of major grants presented a faux check for $7500 to the Eastside Baby Corner. They supply the needy with everything from food formula to school supplies. They have a 26 year history in the area. They will use this money to help with their expansion into Bothell.   Steve assured them they would get the real check.

Chris Boland gave his classification talk. Chris is a transfer from another club and also a past Assistant District Governor. He grew up in Eastern Washington and attended WSU. He intended to go into marketing but got sidetracked into sales. He and a partner formed their own company MerCom.   They do marketing by giving away free stuff.   Could we have our first would be politician? He led a game of heads or tails. There were no fines so the members enjoyed it.

John Dewater interviewed Paul Chapman so the club could meet the new president. The interview got off to a rough start because John thought Paul was a deep sea diver. The questions had little to do with Paul’s real occupation as a real estate portfolio manager. It was entertaining but at least one member thought it could have been deep-six’d.

Mike Ralph made an impassioned plea for the club to step up the pace to get runners for the Race for Autism. It seems we are a little behind with only 15 days left. The message to the club was that it is time to step up.

SAA Tim Leahy celebrated Master’s weekend with an Augusta putting contest. It provided a lot of entertainment but not a lot of money. The members may want to go on the tour.

Kip Bowerman   introduced the speaker: Bryan Slinker who is Dean of the Department of Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience at WSU.

His talk was a fascinating mixture of animal and human medicine and how they interact. Great strides are being made in treating human diseases because of advances in animal medicine. He gave many examples of treatments that have resulted from this crossover.

They also study animal behavior in an effort to learn about human health concerns. One example was the hibernation of bears. They eat themselves morbidly obese before hibernation with no ill effects. Imagine the breakfast line if they can figure that one out.

He touched on global animal health. WSU got a large grant from the Gate’s Foundation to work on this. The ownership of animals goes along way to eliminating poverty for the family. The health of that animal becomes very important to that family.

The last point was the war on rabies. Rabies is not given a lot of thought in the rich world but is a problem in Africa, affecting both animal behavior and human health.

Paul brought the meeting to a close as usual with the thought for the day courtesy of Groucho Marx: Outside the dog, the book is man’s best friend. Inside the dog is too hard to read.

About the Speaker

Bryan Slinker received his B.S. in Zoology from the College of Idaho in 1976, and his D.V.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington State University in 1980 and 1982, respectively (Go Cougs!). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Cardiovascular Research Institute of the University of California, San Francisco. He then served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine (Cardiology Unit) at the University of Vermont from 1986-1992 before returning to Washington State University in 1992 as an Associate Professor in what is now the Department of Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience. Before assuming the position of Dean in November 2008, he served nearly 10 years as the Chair of that department. In addition to those academic leadership positions he has served other concurrent leadership roles at WSU as Vice Provost for Health Sciences, Interim Chair of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Acting Associate Vice Provost for Research. Over his career he has taught applied biomedical statistics, bioethics, and responsible conduct of research to graduate students and veterinary residents, and has taught developmental anatomy, heart and circulatory physiology, and cardiovascular, blood, respiratory, and renal pharmacology to veterinary students. Dr. Slinker's research – funded principally by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association – has focused on heart and cardiac muscle function and adaptation. He has nearly 60 publications in major scientific journals, principally in the American Journal of Physiology, Circulation Research, Circulation, Cardiovascular Research, and Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology. In addition to his experimentally based research publications, he has co-authored several biomedical statistics tutorials for scientific journals as well as an intermediate statistics textbook, Primer of Applied Regression and Analysis of Variance, with a 3rd edition at the publisher in final stages of publication. He is a Fellow of the Cardiovascular Section of the American Physiological Society and a Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science. He is a Director of the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle.