Rapid City Journal from Rapid City, South Dakota • C2

C2 Saturday, September 29, 2018 Rapid City JouRnal 00 1 obituaries rita allgeyer, 92 rapid City Lois a. Cowen, 88 pierre Stanley e. Crowder, 83 Gillette, Wyo. patricia a. erickson, 77 rapid City amanda S.

Heaton, 48 Spearfish Karen K. Lange, 74 Hill City delores m. 84 rapid City Lois e. Warfel, 88 Custer Study: Vaccine could treat head, neck cancer ASSOCIATED PRESS The head and neck cancer came roar- ing back, spreading to his lymph nodes and skin, which developed bleeding tumors. Yet despite a grim prognosis, that man is alive and cancer-free more than two years later.

In a study led by the University of Pennsyl- vania and published last week, researchers hy- pothesize that his remark- able remission is due to a promising combination: an experimental cancer vaccine that activated his disease-fighting cells, plus Opdivo, one of the revolutionary drugs that cut a brake on the immune sys- tem. course, said Charu Aggarwal, the Penn oncologist who led the study. my career, I seen a vaccine as impactful as However, the remission may have been due to Op- divo alone; the study lacks data to rule out that pos- sibility. Robert Ferris, a head and neck surgeon at Uni- versity of Pittsburgh Med- ical Center who headed the pivotal study leading to approval of Opdivo, called the Penn-led study important interme- diate step exploring a strategy that we hope will Conventional vaccines prevent diseases by prim- ing the immune system to recognize the distinctive on invading microbes. Therapeutic cancer vaccines, like the one in this study, are in- tended to work after can- cer develops by provoking a heightened immune re- sponse.

Despite decades of re- search, this approach re- mains experimental. The only approved product, the prostate cancer vac- cine Provenge, was barely effective; the maker filed for bankruptcy in 2015. A major obstacle to treatment vaccines is the fact that cancer arises from the own cells. Although cancer cells pro- duce antigens as they mu- tate, using these telltale proteins as targets for the immune system has proven to be very difficult. Even so, at least four pharmaceutical groups are developing therapeutic vaccines that target human papillomavirus, HPV, the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer, head and neck cancer, and some rare genital cancers.

These diseases can be warded off with the pre- ventive HPV vaccine that is recommended for all ado- lescents, but it exist until 12 years ago. Much to the dismay of public health authorities, vaccination rates remain low. And while screening can detect and treat cervical precan- cers, there are no early de- tection methods for head and neck cancers; experts call the surging incidence of these malignancies an The vaccine in the new study, called MEDI0457, was originally developed by Inovio with technol- ogy pioneered at Penn. In 2015, MedImmune, which is part of AstraZeneca, ac- quired exclusive rights to the drug. MEDI0457 contains a DNA ring called a plas- mid that programs the cells to produce two HPV antigens.

The vaccine is injected into the muscle and en- ters cells with the help of a small electrical pulse ap- plied to the skin. When the cells make the antigens, this triggers the immune system to activate dis- ease-fighting white blood cells, so-called cells. For the study, pub- lished in Clinical Can- cer Research, 22 patients with head and neck can- cer received conventional treatment either surgery or chemotherapy and ra- diation that eliminated all signs of cancer. This was supplemented by four doses of the experimental vaccine, which caused no serious side effects. Eighteen patients, or 80 percent, showed elevated cell activity that lasted at least three months af- ter the final vaccine dose.

While that is an encour- aging sign, the study was too preliminary to detect clinical effectiveness such as tumor shrinkage or im- proved survival. OBITUARIES services Rodney L. Antes 10 a.m. at Living Word Church in rapid City James D. Cottier 1 p.m.

at martin activity Center Albert C. Dare Jr. 2 p.m. at behrens-Wilson Funeral Home in rapid City Phyllis E. Erickson 2 p.m.

at South Canyon Lutheran Church in rapid City Jeffrey R. Feiok 10:30 a.m. Cdt at trinity Lutheran Church in platte Anthony Graziano 11 a.m. at Calvary Lutheran Church in rapid City Florene Reyman 10 a.m. at Leverington Funeral Home of the black Hills in belle Fourche Reece W.

Richards 2 p.m. at Leverington Funeral Home of the black Hills in belle Fourche Janielle F. Rowland noon at Wounded Knee district School in manderson Benjamin F. Sweet 1:30 p.m. at Crossroads Wesleyan Church in rapid City Rita Allgeyer RAPID CITY Rita All- geyer, 92, died Sunday, Sept.

23, 2018, at the Mercy Hospital at East Dubuque, IL. Rita was born March 27, 1926, in a three-story farm- house in Sinsinawa, WI. She grew up in East Dubuque, IL, with her five brothers and one sister. Recess was her favorite subject. In 1948 she married Jack Allgeyer who was a friend of her brothers, and probably a prerequisite before he could date their sister! They had two daughters, Karen Debra and moved to Rapid City when the girls were young.

Rita could pretty much sew anything and made many of her own, and her clothes. (These talents were not passed on to her daughters.) Later she put her sewing talents to work and sewed draperies for by and gained new friend- ships that would last her lifetime. Rita was a loving wife of 50 years until Jack passed away, a devoted mother, mother-in-law, sister, sister- in-law, grandmother, great-grandmother, and friend. She valued her friends as family. Quick to laugh at her- self, she had a very view of people around her and of life itself.

She was the first to offer help and the last to ask for it. Rita will be sorely missed by all of us left behind, though she will always live in our hearts and our thoughts. Rita was preceded in death by her husband Jack in 1998; her sister, three of her brothers; and four of her sisters-in-law. She is survived and missed by Karen (Allgeyer) and Doyle Nehl; Debra (Allgeyer) and John Strauss; Francis and Pearl Rosemeyer; Joe Rosemeyer; and grandsons, Travis Carter and Craig Carter; and great-grandchil- dren, Avery and Landon Carter. Also surviving are a whole slew of nieces, nephews and dear friends.

Visitation will be from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 30 at Osheim Schmidt Funeral Home. Christian Funeral Mass will be offered at 10 a.m.

Monday, Oct. 1, at Blessed Sacrament Church. Burial will be at Black Hills National Cemetery near Sturgis. Full online obituary and guestbook are available at www.osheimschmidt. com.

Patricia A. Erickson RAPID CITY Patricia Ann Erickson, 77, died Sept. 27, 2018. Funeral services will be at 10 a.m. Oct.

3, at Cross- roads Wesleyan Church. Behrens-Wilson Funeral Home Lois A. Cowen PIERRE Lois Ann Cowen, 88, died Sept. 27, 2018. Black Hills Funeral Home of Sturgis Stanley E.

Crowder GILLETTE, Wyo. Stanley E. Crowder, 83, died Sept. 22, 2018. Black Hills Funeral Home of Sturgis, S.D.

Amanda S. Heaton SPEARFISH Amanda Sue Heaton, 48, died Sept. 25, 2018. Visitation will be from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Sept. 30, at Kinkade Funeral Chapel in Sturgis. Funeral services will be at 10 a.m. Oct. 1, at the Coun- tryside Church.

Burial will follow at Whitewood Cem- etery. Kinkade Funeral Chapel of Sturgis Karen K. Lange HILL CITY Karen K. Lange, 74, died Sept. 27, 2018.

Visitation will be at 7 p.m. Sept. 30, at the Little White Church. Funeral services will be at 2 p.m. Oct.

1, at the church. Burial will be at the Hill City Cemetery, followed by a celebration of life lun- cheon at the church. Kirk Funeral Home of Rapid City Delores M. RAPID CITY Delores Mae 84, died Sept. 27, 2018.

Osheim Schmidt Funeral Home Lois E. Warfel CUSTER Lois Elaine Warfel, 88, died Sept. 27, 2018. Lois is survived by her sons, Jeff (Laurie) Warfel of Yankton, Joe (Shirley) Warfel of Custer; daughter, Judy (Curt Schmitz) Warfel of Custer; and brother, Landy (Rose Ann) Stinnett of Lakewood, CO. Per request there will be no services.

Chamberlain Funeral Home TOM AVRIL Tribune News Service When Robert Shafran started community college in upstate New York in 1980, he was puzzled that some of his fellow students seemed unusually friendly, acting as though they already knew him. That mystery is retold in the opening moments of the movie Identical and it gets more bizarre from there. Spoiler alert: Shafran learned he was one of a set of triplets who were sepa- rated soon after birth and placed with adoptive fam- ilies part of a study in which researchers explored the age-old question of how human beings are shaped by nature and nurture. believe the story if someone else were telling he says in the documentary, which came out this summer. The three were near-identical in appear- ance and seemed, at a glance, to share a number of behavioral traits.

They had the same genes, after all. Yet in certain respects, their personalities were no- ticeably different. Should that be chalked up to the families who raised them, the filmmakers ask? The film suggests that question remains some- what unresolved, at least for these triplets and other par- ticipants in the study (which drew fire from ethicists more on that later). But on a population level, scientists know a great deal about the relative roles of genetics and the environment in shaping all sorts of characteristics both physical traits such as height and weight, and behavioral attributes such as personality and mental health. For starters: Identical twins (and triplets) are not 100 percent identical, even though they originate from the same egg and sperm.

Each time our cells divide and the DNA is copied, there is a chance for small, usually inconsequential, mistakes. not a perfect copy said Gene Fisch, a behavioral genetics re- searcher and adjunct pro- fessor of statistics at Baruch College in New York. Second point: instead of saying nature vs. nurture, call it genetics and the en- vironment the sum total of a experiences and exposures. And forget the word versus, as the two life-shaping forces interact with each other.

For exam- ple, the environment can affect how a genes are expressed a phenom- enon known as epigenetics. Imagine a person born with a combination of traits needed to be a good reader, said Rebecca Waller, an as- sistant professor in clinical psychology at the Univer- sity of Pennsylvania. Those tendencies can be enhanced by environmental factors. going to read more, and going to make you even she said. maybe because your parents see that, they buy you more books.

Or maybe they drop you at the library on a Likewise, researchers have identified numerous genes that increase a per- risk for depression, but the outcome is far from certain, said Patrick Sulli- van, a professor of genetics and psychiatry at the Uni- versity of North Caroli- na-Chapel Hill. depends what hap- pens to you, what taught, whether you learn skills about resilience, and the slings and arrows of outrageous Sulli- van said. For decades before the advent of modern gene-se- quencing techniques, studying twins was a pow- erful tool for answering such questions. By com- paring identical twins with fraternal twins those who share just half of their DNA, on average scientists could tease out how much of the variation in a given trait was due to genetics. Sullivan was part of a team that analyzed the re- sults from 50 years of such studies.

Generally speaking, genetics have been found to play a strong role in shap- ing easy-to-measure phys- ical characteristics such as height, but they have less influence on behavioral at- tributes. No surprise there, said Baruch Fisch. brain is orders of magnitude more compli- cated than, pick an organ, whether bladder or heart or he said. In most of these twin studies, adoptive and birth parents were told the goal of the research and agreed to take part. Not so for the children who were placed for adoption in the movie.

Renewed spoiler alert: Not only were the adoptive parents and children un- aware of the aims, but the researchers had a hand in deciding where they were placed. In the case of the triplets, one was placed with a blue-collar family, another with a middle-class household, and the third in a wealthy home. Other researchers have blasted this arrangement as a grotesque breach of ethics. It was all the more surpris- ing because one of the study leaders, Peter Neubauer, was Jewish and had left his native Austria in the late 1930s under the growing shadow of Nazi Germany a regime notorious for its experiments on concentra- tion camp prisoners. It remains unclear what he learned from the study, as the results were never published and Neubauer died in 2008.

But when Shafran and his newfound brothers became celebrities in the 1980s, family, friends, and even talk-show hosts rushed to draw their own conclusions. As the film re- lates, much was made of su- perficial similarities such as the fact that all three liked Marlboro cigarettes, older women, and wrestling. Likely a coincidence, said James Tabery, a University of Utah associate professor of philosophy and the au- thor of Beyond Versus: The Struggle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture. look for similar- ities because it sort of feeds this narrative of, look, that amazing? your genes that are driving Tabery said. focus on the fact that one drinks Pepsi, or another drinks Sprite, and maybe another does not drink soda at On a tragic note, one of the triplets, Eddy Galland, killed himself in 1995, and the filmmakers imply that his adoptive strict, unyielding demeanor played a role.

Fisch is skeptical. that were the case, there would be a whole lot more the re- searcher said. Shafran and the other surviving triplet, David Kellman, have been granted access to some of the find- ings in the study in which they unwittingly took part. But the public will have to wait. At direc- tion, they were sealed in an archive at Yale University until 2066.

Film reveals science of nature vs. nurture MONGREL MEDIA Identical is about triplets separated at birth and later reunited..