Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.

Nguyen’s suicide has sparked a contentious legal battle headed to Massachusetts’ highest court over whether schools can be held responsible when students take their own lives. The case is being closely watched by colleges and universities, who say a decision against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would place an unreasonable burden on untrained employees to stop suicides. “It would be groundbreaking,” said Gary Pavela, a consultant on law and policy issues in higher education and author of a book about legal questions surrounding student suicides. “It would cause alarm in higher education,” he said. The student’s family says his death was preventable and that the school had a legal duty to use reasonable care to protect him from harm. Nguyen’s professors and other MIT officials knew he was a suicide risk, but failed to get him the help he needed, an attorney for Nguyen’s family argues. Months before Nguyen’s death, a professor encouraged his colleagues to pass him or they might have “blood on their hands.” Moments before Nguyen jumped, the professor “read him the riot act” over an email Nguyen sent to another MIT official that they deemed inappropriate, court records say. “Academic freedom is not a license to needlessly and recklessly endanger students known to be at risk of death with impunity; and this court should not allow it to become one at institutions that routinely admit students — many with mental health issues — as young as their mid-teens,” attorney Jeffrey Beeler wrote in court documents. Beeler declined to comment and said Nguyen’s family didn’t want to speak to the media. MIT says the school wasn’t aware of the severity of his condition and he was treated by outside professionals and refused on-campus resources. None of the nine professionals who treated Nguyen while he was at MIT believed he was an imminent risk of killing himself, the school says. “Mr. Nguyen’s suicide was a tragedy. That does not warrant a legal conclusion that MIT or any individual associated with MIT had a legal duty to prevent it,” attorneys for the school, two professors and one dean named in the lawsuit say in court documents. MIT, which refused to answer questions about the case, said in a statement it “remains committed to the well-being of its students, offering a robust network of support resources, including comprehensive mental health services.” Nguyen’s family attorney disputes the idea that the man didn’t want help and has accused MIT of blaming the victim. No state supreme court has ever found that colleges and universities have a legal duty to prevent student suicides, MIT’s attorneys say. Courts have generally been reluctant to do so because, among other things, suicide is an impulsive act that’s difficult to predict, Pavela said. A Massachusetts trial court judge ruled in 2005 that an MIT housemaster and dean could be held responsible for the death of a woman who lit herself on fire in her dorm room. But Elizabeth Shin’s case, which was later settled for an undisclosed amount, never reached the state’s highest court. The Supreme Judicial Court will hear arguments in Nguyen’s case on Tuesday after a lower court judge tossed the lawsuit last year. A group of 18 colleges and universities — including Harvard University and Boston College — is urging the court to reject the case, saying a decision in favor of the family could have devastating consequences. Fear of liability may cause professors and others without mental health expertise to overreact to concerns, which in turn could discourage students from coming forward with their problems, the schools say. Dr. Paul Appelbaum, a psychiatry expert at Columbia University, agrees. “To the extent that you heighten every resident assistant’s sensitivity to the risk of suicidality, with the threat of liability hanging over them, they are far more likely to over predict, over intervene, see it where it’s not,” Appelbaum said. The Nguyen family attorney and their supporters — including the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys — say the schools’ concerns are baseless. Beeler, in his filing, said he merely wants the court to affirm that the duty to provide reasonable care “extends to the ivory tower as it does every other civilized corner of the Commonwealth.” Thomas Murphy, chair of the amicus committee of the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys, says a jury should get to decide whether MIT was negligent and caused Nguyen’s suicide. “Maybe the school can convince them that they didn’t cause (Nguyen’s suicide) and it was going to happen anyway,” he said. ___ Follow Alanna Durkin Richer at http://twitter.com/aedurkinricher. Read more of her work at http://bit.ly/2hIhzDb
Case stirs question of school liability for student suicides.

They said a device that stimulates the vagus nerve in the neck while simultaneously playing different sounds for several weeks helped eliminate the condition in a group of rats. A trial of the treatment in humans is set to start in Europe this year, said Dr. Navzer Engineer of MicroTransponder, a medical device company affiliated with The University of Texas at Dallas, whose study appears in the journal Nature. Tinnitus is sometimes brought on by hearing loss. It occurs as cells in the inner ear are damaged, often from a loud noise. Current drugs help mask tinnitus, but the condition is incurable. Engineer’s team thinks tinnitus may be caused when too many brain cells become tuned to a specific tone in the brain. So his team set out to train the brain to ignore the nerve signals that cause the ringing sound. To do this, they paired a device that sends electrical impulses to the vagus nerve in the neck with different sounds. Stimulating this nerve releases chemicals such as acetylcholine and norepinephrine that trigger changes in the brain. The University of Texas at Dallas team tested this approach in a series of experiments with rats, using an indirect but accepted method of testing hearing in animals. In one, they stimulated the vagus nerve while playing different sounds 300 times a day for 20 days to a group of eight rats with a form of tinnitus. The tones were close to the frequency of the ringing sound, and the hope was to trick some of the nerve cells into listening to the new tones rather than the ringing tone. When the team checked the nerve responses to different tones, the tinnitus had disappeared in rats exposed to the tones and nerve stimulation, but it persisted in a group of control animals. “Unlike previous treatments, we’re not masking the tinnitus. We are eliminating the source of the tinnitus,” Michael Kilgard of the University of Texas-Dallas, who worked on the study, said in a statement. MicroTransponder is developing a wireless medical device to stimulate the vagus nerve and hopes to test it in people later this year. Cyberonics Inc already sells vagus nerve stimulation devices for people with epilepsy and depression. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, part of the National Institutes of Health, funded a large part of the research.
Device treatment may silence ringing in the ears.

Almost three years after he received bone marrow stem cells from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that resists HIV infection - and more than 18 months after he came off antiretroviral drugs - highly sensitive tests still show no trace of the man’s previous HIV infection. “There is no virus there that we can measure. We can’t detect anything,” said Ravindra Gupta, a professor and HIV biologist who co-led a team of doctors treating the man. AIDS experts said the case is a proof of the concept that scientists will one day be able to end AIDS, and marks a “critical moment” in the search for an HIV cure, but does not mean that cure has already been found. Gupta described his patient as “functionally cured” and “in remission”, but cautioned: “It’s too early to say he’s cured.”  The man is being called “the London patient”, in part because his case is similar to the first known case of a functional cure of HIV - in an American man, Timothy Brown, who became known as the Berlin patient when he underwent similar treatment in Germany in 2007 which also cleared his HIV. Brown, who had been living in Berlin, has since moved to the United States and, according to HIV experts, is still HIV-free. Some 37 million people worldwide are currently infected with HIV and the AIDS pandemic has killed about 35 million people worldwide since it began in the 1980s. Scientific research into the complex virus has in recent years led to the development of drug combinations that can keep it at bay in most patients. Gupta, now at Cambridge University, treated the London patient when he was working at University College London. The man had contracted HIV in 2003, Gupta said, and in 2012 was also diagnosed with a type of blood cancer called Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. In 2016, when he was very sick with cancer, doctors decided to seek a transplant match for him. “This was really his last chance of survival,” Gupta told Reuters. The donor - who was unrelated - had a genetic mutation known as ‘CCR5 delta 32’, which confers resistance to HIV. The transplant went relatively smoothly, Gupta said, but there were some side effects, including the patient suffering a period of “graft-versus-host” disease - a condition in which donor immune cells attack the recipient’s immune cells. Most experts say it is inconceivable such treatments could be a way of curing all patients. The procedure is expensive, complex and risky. To do this in others, exact match donors would have to be found in the tiny proportion of people — most of them of northern European descent — who have the CCR5 mutation that makes them resistant to the virus. “Although this is not a viable large-scale strategy for a cure, it does represent a critical moment,” said Anton Pozniak, president of the International AIDS Society. “The hope is that this will eventually lead to a safe, cost-effective and easy strategy...using gene technology or antibody techniques.”  Specialists said it is also not yet clear whether the CCR5 resistance is the only key - or whether the graft-versus-host disease may have been just as important. Both the Berlin and London patients had this complication, which may have played a role in the loss of HIV-infected cells, Gupta said. His team plans to use these findings to explore potential new HIV treatment strategies. “We need to understand if we could knock out this (CCR5) receptor in people with HIV, which may be possible with gene therapy,” he said. The London patient, whose case was set to be reported in the journal Nature and presented at a medical conference in Seattle on Tuesday, has asked his medical team not to reveal his name, age, nationality or other details.

London HIV patient becomes world's second AIDS cure hope.