Quick Links
> Clinical Trials Info
>Sign up for e-mail updates
>Support the Faustman Lab
>Host an event or fundraiser
>Patient information forms
> Clinical Trials Info
>Sign up for e-mail updates
>Support the Faustman Lab
>Host an event or fundraiser
>Patient information forms
Dr. Denise Faustman
Get updates on our research
Keep in touch with the Faustman Lab. Sign up for e-mail updates on the clinical trials and more.
>Sign up
>Get information on our clinical trials
For questions about the clinical trial, please e-mail us directly.
>E-mail us
Follow us 
Watch Dr. Faustman's interview about the Phase I trial
Your donation will directly support our Phase II research.
Raised to date: $18.4 million
Our total need: $25.2 million.
Raised to date: $18.4 million
Our total need: $25.2 million.
------------
Interested in the Phase II Trial?
The Faustman Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital
Denise Faustman, MD, PhD, is Director of the Immunobiology
Laboratory at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and an Associate
Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her current research
focuses on discovering and developing new treatments for type 1 diabetes
and other autoimmune diseases, including Crohn's disease, lupus,
scleroderma, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren's syndrome, and multiple
sclerosis. She is currently leading a human clinical trial program
testing the efficacy of the BCG vaccine for reversal of long-term type 1
diabetes. Positive results from the Phase I study were reported in 2012.Dr. Faustman's type 1 diabetes research has earned her notable awards such as the Oprah Achievement Award for “Top Health Breakthrough by a Female Scientist” (2005), the "Women in Science Award" from the American Medical Women’s Association and Wyeth Pharmaceutical Company for her contributions to autoimmune disease research (2006), and the Goldman Philanthropic Partnerships/Partnership for Cures “George and Judith Goldman Angel Award” for research to find an effective treatment for type 1 diabetes (2011). Her previous research accomplishments include the first scientific description of modifying donor tissue antigens to change their foreignness. This achievement earned her the prestigious National Institutes of Health and National Library of Medicine “Changing the Face of Medicine” Award (2003) as one of 300 American physicians (one of 35 in research) honored for seminal scientific achievements in the United States.
Dr. Faustman earned her MD and PhD from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, and completed her internship, residency, and fellowships in Internal Medicine and Endocrinology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.
© 2014 Massachusetts General Hospital
It’s not only what you have, but how you feel.
When
it comes to membership in the middle class, earnings and assets are
just part of the definition. Nearly nine out of 10 people consider
themselves middle class, as a recent survey by the Pew Research Center found, regardless of whether their incomes languish near the poverty line or skim the top stratum of earners.
“Middle
income is not necessarily the same thing as middle class,” said Rakesh
Kochhar, a senior research associate at Pew. Even as the proportion of
households in the middle-income brackets has narrowed, people’s
identification with the middle class remains broad.
That’s
because the middle-class label is as much about aspirations among
Americans as it is about economics. But a perspective that was once
characterized by comfort and optimism has increasingly been overlaid
with stress and anxiety.
Part
of the reason has to do with lost jobs and stagnating incomes. At the
same time, the psychological frame — how Americans feel about their
security and prospects — and the sociological — how they stack up in
relation to their parents, friends, neighbors and colleagues — are just
as important as purely economic criteria. And on both these counts,
middle-class Americans say they are feeling increasingly vulnerable.
A Shifting Middle
Articles in this series focus on the reshaping of the American economy and its effects on the workforce and the middle class.
Part 1 Health Care Opens Stable Career Path, Taken Mainly by Women
Part 2 As Demand for Welders Resurges, Community Colleges Offer Classes
“There
is a very big difference between the psychological self-definition of
class and anything approaching a useful economic definition of class,”
said Richard Reeves, a senior fellow in economic studies at the
Brookings Institution. “Policy in the end will hinge quite importantly
on what you mean when you’re talking about the middle class and who you
mean.”
And
that’s the political challenge for Democrats and Republicans looking to
inspire voters with policies to address what President Obama calls
“middle-class economics.” Any appeals have to involve both cents and
sensibility.
Middle-class
anxiety has been driven by several factors: increasing instability in
incomes, a sense among many Americans that they are failing to keep up
with the gains of previous generations, and an increasing gap between
themselves and the very rich.
A recent report
from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis concluded that
“families that are neither rich nor poor may be under more downward
economic and financial pressure than common but simplistic rank-based
measures of income or wealth would suggest.”
The
study, conducted by William R. Emmons and Bryan J. Noeth, found that
one reason many Americans viewed themselves as struggling was that their
real incomes had not advanced significantly beyond their parents’ even
when they reached higher educational levels, while those who matched
their parents’ achievements were actually worse off.
Economic Roller Coaster
Most Americans move in and out of the middle class at
different points in their lives. By the time they have turned 60, almost
80 percent have drawn on unemployment insurance or welfare, or have
fallen below the poverty level for at least a year. By contrast, more
than 30 percent have received an exceptionally high income for one year
or more. Many have experienced both extremes.
Insecurity
Affluence
Drawn unemployment
insurance or welfare or
below the poverty level
Earning over
$200,000
(2009 dollars)
80
%
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
25
30
35
40
45
50
55
60
Age
As
J. Bradford DeLong, an economist at the University of California,
Berkeley, put it: “People who thought they were upwardly mobile are
finding themselves with no higher real incomes. And people who thought
they were sociologically stable are finding themselves poorer.”
Money,
of course, provides the wherewithal for acquiring what are considered
the traditional bedrocks of a middle-class life: adequate health care,
college for the children and retirement savings, generally with a car
and a regular summer vacation thrown in.
Some
version of that basket can be bought across a range of incomes,
depending on location. It might include a used Pontiac instead of a
late-model Lexus, or a small walk-up instead of a house with a backyard.
And even though consumption was once a useful shorthand guide to a
middle-class lifestyle, it is no longer as reliable in a world where
cellphones and flat-screen TVs are staples in a majority of households
below the poverty line and retirement savings, even among top earners,
are often treated as a luxury.
There
isn’t one middle class, but many middle classes. Still, what all of
them ultimately require, experts say, is a sense of economic security.
“If
there’s no security, there’s no middle class,” said Thomas Hirschl, a
sociologist at Cornell and an author of “Chasing the American Dream.”
Interactive Graphic
The Changing Nature of Middle-Class Jobs
The types of jobs that pay middle-class wages have
shifted since 1980. Fewer of these positions are in male-dominated
production occupations, while a greater share are in workplaces more
open to women.
That feeling of security has been eroded by several factors.
Median
per capita income has basically been flat since 2000, adjusted for
inflation. The typical American family makes slightly less than a
typical family did 15 years ago. And while many goods have become
cheaper or better, the price of three of the biggest middle-class
expenditures — housing, college and health care — have gone up much
faster than the rate of inflation.
Equally
important, Mr. Hirschl found a high degree of income volatility among
most Americans in the four decades between 1969 and 2011. At some point
in their working lives, a full 70 percent earned enough to put them in
the top fifth of earners, and as many as 30 percent reached the
equivalent of $200,000 in 2009 dollars, or roughly the top 4 percent.
Similarly,
nearly 80 percent at least temporarily plunged into a red zone, where
their income dropped near or below the poverty line, or they were
compelled to gain access to a social safety net program like food stamps
or collect unemployment insurance. More than half of Americans ages 25
to 60 will experience at least one year hovering around the poverty
line.
For
most people, their 20s and 30s have traditionally been the least secure
decades, with earning power building to a peak in their 40s and 50s,
Mr. Hirschl said. But the recession upended that pattern for many
Americans. Older workers experienced an extended bout of unemployment,
often followed by a new job at a lower wage.
The Health Care Wager
By Channon Hodge on Publish Date February 22, 2015.
Photo by Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times.
A recent Pew Research Center poll
found that four out of 10 Americans said household incomes had hardly
recovered from the recession; most everyone else said there had been
only a partial recovery.
And compared with the mid-’90s, a smaller share of Americans now say they believe it is possible to start out poor, work hard and get rich, the classic tale captured by the American dream.
Income volatility has given many people both a taste of life in an upper-income bracket and a bracing slap of instability.
“Income
fluidity is a double-edged sword, creating opportunity for many, along
with insecurity that this opportunity may end sooner than hoped for,”
Mr. Hirschl concluded.
What
is particularly surprising about the increasing income volatility since
the 1970s, said Dan Sichel, an economics professor at Wellesley
College, is that it coincided with an unusually stable stint of economic
growth that lasted from the mid-1980s until the recession in 2007.
Interactive Graphic: The Shrinking American Middle Class
“There was a big increase in the number of people who saw big drops in their income,” Mr. Sichel said.
That
psychological lens helps explain rising middle-class anxiety. What
about the social frame? Here, increasing inequality has helped undermine
middle-class security and optimism.
Economists
and other researchers have repeatedly found that the satisfaction a
paycheck brings is related not only to its size, but how it compares to
other people’s. That verity is apparently more pointed for middle-income
households than for those at the lower and higher end of the spectrum.
A review
of the latest studies on the middle class by the Congressional Research
Service concluded that “when those at the upper end of the distribution
fare much better than they do, the level of middle-class satisfaction
is generally lessened.”
Yet in the last 15 years, nearly all of the gains in income have streamed toward the upper end of the spectrum.
Robert
H. Frank, an economist at Cornell University and the author of “The
Winner-Take-All Society,” explains that across most white-collar
professions — whether dentists or sales supervisors — a very small group
at the top is doing spectacularly better even as a great majority is
mostly plugging along. “No matter who you are, whatever group you define
yourself in terms of, you’re poorer now in relative terms than you were
earlier,” he said.
The
feeling of comparative deprivation and the ultrarich separating
themselves from the rest of society helps explain why only 1 percent of
Americans accept the rich or upper-income label. Even most people
earning over $250,000 — the top 5 percent of wage earners — identify as
middle class. There’s always someone wealthier around.
“The
gap between you and them is much bigger than it used to be,” Mr. Frank
said. “That’s why people feel more stressed out than they used to.”
No comments:
Post a Comment