By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Tufts Health Plan has quietly loosened its restrictions on weight-loss surgery, expanding who can get insurance coverage for the operations and shrinking how much time patients must first spend in a counseling program.

The restrictions were criticized by the state Department of Public Health, patients and surgeons even before they went into effect in March.

In a statement issued yesterday in response to questions about its new policy, Tufts said it was committed to offering its members the best chance for long-term success.

"Working most closely with bariatric surgeons at Tufts-New England Medical Center, we jointly agreed to guidelines for the coverage of bariatric surgery," the statement said.

Short White Coat is a blog written by first-year Harvard medical student Ishani Ganguli. Ishani's posts appear here, as part of White Coat Notes. E-mail Ishani at shortwhitecoat@gmail.com.

Now that lectures are videotaped, Harvard medical professors seem to be hamming it up for the camera, using song and dance to entice students to watch and learn.

Earlier this month, Shiv Pillai tried genres as diverse as the ode, the mantra, and hip hop to summarize and attach some sort of teleology to complicated immunology pathways while lightening up otherwise tedious lecture-packed days. His melancholy take on T cells: "Looking for antigen below and above, Many will die of unrequited love."

"Thread that peptide into TAP," he added with an enthusiastic shimmy, encouraging us to join in. "Everybody do the lymphocyte rap!"

On Kevin, M.D., Dr. Kevin Pho offers a primer on protecting one's Google reputation.

"There is no doubt that patients and potential employers will Google you as an initial screen. It is to your benefit to ensure that favorable stories come up when your name is entered as a search term."

On Flea, the Boston-area pediatrician shares a thing or two he has learned by Googling the plaintiff's attorney in the malpractice trial in which he will be testifying. (Doesn't he think they read blogs?)

"What patients hope for and expect from malpractice litigation is 'compensation, explanation, and a safer healthcare system,'" he quotes from a presentation by the lawyer he found. "Flea's adversary could have stopped with compensation. As we said before, if a patient wants an explanation, he can acquire it much less expensively than a lawsuit: He can ask the doctor."

On WBUR's CommonHealth, Nancy Turnbull of the Harvard School of Public Health answers her teen-age nephew's objections to the Massachusetts healthcare law, from the name "Commonwealth Choice," when individuals are required to get coverage, to vegans paying for the ills of meat-eaters.

"I know you think it’s an infringement on individual rights that the state is telling people that they have to buy health insurance," writes Turnbull, who also is president of the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation.. "That type of attitude comes from your father’s side of the family —- he hates wearing his seatbelt too."

The University of Miami medical school has embarked on a billion-dollar campaign to become a top research center and create the conditions for biotech success seen in places like Boston and Cambridge and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, a story in today's Miami Herald says.

The school, led by university president and Clinton administration Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, has hired away 51 of the 180 researchers at the Duke University Center for Human Genetics over the past year, the story says. Miami is pouring money into new research centers, but it's also helping with housing costs, the school told the paper.

Within the past six months, the story says, Miami's medical school has brought these researchers on board, along with about $70 million in multiyear grants from the National Institutes of Health:

Dr. Joshua M. Hare, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and seven colleagues.

Dr. Marc Estes Lippman, a breast-cancer researcher at the University of Michigan, and 30 colleagues.

Dr. Ralph Sacco, a Columbia University stroke expert, and 10 colleagues.

Dr. Julio Licinio, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, and 20 colleagues.

Miami spokesman Omar Montejo told the Globe today that no Boston researchers are among the scientists recently recruited to the medical school.

If there is life on Mars, a Harvard geneticist Gary Ruvkun thinks it resembles something we already know. Now, he's trying to prove it.

Laura Preston, a ninth-grade earth sciences teacher at Salem High School in New Hampshire, shares her blog about spending the last four weeks aboard a research vessel in the Pacific Ocean studying undersea volcanoes.

Some situations are not rehearsed in medical school, where we focused on the details of diseases, not on what to advise families struggling with problems like childhood obesity, parental smoking, overdose, television abuse, Internet pornography, and anxiety, writes Dr. Victoria Rogers McEvoy, chief of pediatrics and the medical director of the Mass. General West Medical Group and assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Also in Health/Science, meet Dr. Norman Hollenberg, who is raising hopes that the secret elixir of life may have less to do with wheat germ and more with cocoa. And does Botox help with migraines and do people behave oddly when the when the moon is full?

In Business, just four months into his job as head of the Joslin Diabetes Center, Ranch Kimball has pulled the plug on the center's ambitious plan to build a new laboratory building and 29-story residential tower at its Longwood home.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is struggling and often failing to do right by the many veterans with serious combat injuries who need closely supervised care but live in remote areas, a Globe review has found, Charles Sennott writes in Sunday's Globe. Realigned in the 1990s to concentrate specialized care in urban areas, the system now finds itself overwhelmed by the wounded from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- engagements that have, even more than other modern-day conflicts, been fought by soldiers from rural America.

Along with Canadian red squirrels and European blackcap birds, the mosquito -- a non biting variety found from Florida to Canada -- is one of only five known species that scientists say have already evolved because of global warming, Beth Daley writes in the Sunday Globe, the fourth in a series of occasional articles examining climate change, its effects, and possible solutions.

By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff

Hallmark Health System, the parent organization of Lawrence Memorial Hospital and Melrose-Wakefield Hospital, continues its expansion spree, in part to better compete with Boston's teaching hospitals for suburban patients.

Hallmark, which opened a $4 million cancer center in Stoneham in February, plans to open the $4.6 million Hallmark Health Medical Center in Reading near Jordan's Furniture in July. It will be equipped to perform ultrasound, CT and bone density scans and digital mammography, and include medical offices for cardiologists, internists, a midwife, obstetricians/gynecologists and orthopedic specialists. Renovations also are underway for a $5 million Cardiac & Endovascular Center on the Melrose-Wakefield Hospital campus.

Like many community hospital networks, Hallmark is feeling the heat as Boston's academic medical centers expand more aggressively into the suburbs, and is trying to woo patients with comprehensive, high-tech services that are more convenient.

Two papers in Science, including one by Harvard researchers, were among four published yesterday in Science and Nature Genetics on genetic risk factors for developing diabetes. Alice Dembner describes them in today's Globe.

Reseachers from Massachusetts General Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Brigham and Women's Hospital are part of an international team reporting on a new mechanism involved in resistance to "smart" cancer drugs Iressa and Tarceva that target lung cancer cell growth.

Scientists have identified a new gene that helps regulate the body's clock and Giulio F. Draetta of Merck
Research Laboratories in Boston and colleagues report on a molecular component of this clock involved in the
length of the circadian period.

A team that includes researchers from the CBR Institute for Biomedical Research and Harvard Medical School in Boston reveal how the influence of micro-RNAs, small RNA molecules that regulate gene expression, extends to the immune system.

On WBUR's CommonHealth, Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, asks if high-deductible insurance coverage is worse than being uninsured for patients but better for hospitals seeking payment for services.

"Forcing modest-income families to buy insurance policies with huge deductibles, co-payments and co-insurance may help hospitals, but leave patients even worse off than when they were uninsured," he writes.

Maybe there is an easier way to get through medical school. This one's certainly cheaper.

Third-year surgical resident Dr. Timothy Millington and his wife and Newsweek science writer Mary Carmichael, both of Boston, have condensed his six-figure Duke University medical training into a 96-page textbook being sold on the Internet for less than $20, a story in the Ottawa Citizen says.

When you buy Med School in a Box, a product of Mental Floss Magazine and Quirk Books, you also get "heroes of medicine trading cards, "extra credit" flashcards, a board exam trivia challenge and, of course, a rolled college diploma with real Latin words, the story says.

"There’s a certain amount of cynicism in medicine and we tried to satirize that rather than subscribe to it," Millington said in the story.

There is actual medical information in the book, according to the story.

"You’re better off taking medical advice from Med School in a Box than 'Grey’s Anatomy,' " he said.

Let's hope he meant the TV show.

Smoldering medical waste left in a sterilizing machine spawned the cloud of smoke that wafted through a laboratory last month on the campus of Boston University's medical school, city health officials and the university said yesterday.

Lucy Wightman (at right in photo), who drew stares in the 1970s and '80s as the celebrated stripper Princess Cheyenne in Boston's Combat Zone, held the gaze of 16 jurors yesterday as a state prosecutor accused her of fraudulently posing as a licensed psychologist and treating children whose parents had no idea she lacked the proper credentials.

Up to 6,000 hogs in California, Kansas, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah that ate pet food tainted with industrial chemicals cannot be safely sold to humans, federal authorities said yesterday, and should be euthanized at the farms where they have been held from the market.

Infant mortality has dropped by 18 percent in Afghanistan, in one of the first real signs of recovery for the country five years after the fall of the Taliban regime, health officials said yesterday.

The Department of Health and Human Services is failing in its duty to make sure that nursing homes correct their shortcomings and then continue to meet quality standards, a Globe editorial says.

By Alice Dembner, Globe Staff

Four separate scientific teams, including one led by Harvard researchers, are today reporting progress toward unraveling the genetic basis of the most common form of diabetes.

They have identified three new genetic risk factors and confirmed five others that were discovered over the last few years. An additional risk factor identified by one group has not yet been confirmed by others.

Together, the genetic defects account for about 5 percent of the risk of getting the illness, said David Altshuler, associate professor of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School and a leader of one of the four teams that included the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

"The picture that is emerging is of multiple genes, each with a modest effect" on diabetes, he said.

Overall, genetics account for about half the risk of getting type 2 diabetes, according to Altshuler. Environment and such behaviors as obesity and lack of exercise account for the remaining risk.

Newton-Wellesley Hospital has opened a new center for joint reconstruction surgery in collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr. Joseph C. McCarthy (left), who came to Newton-Wellesley from New England Baptist Hospital in September, was named director of the Jim and Ellen Kaplan Center for Joint Reconstruction Surgery when it opened Monday. A $1 million gift from the Kaplans will help fund three new operating rooms in the center.

McCarthy was also appointed vice chair for program development in orthopedic surgery at Mass. General.

Dr. Mark D. Aronson of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Dr. Jerrold F. Rosenbaum of Massachusetts General Hospital are being honored for liftime contributions to their fields.

Aronson has won the Society of General Internal Medicine's Career Achievement in Medical Education Award. He founded Beth Israel's hospital medicine program, incorporating it into the residency curriculum and into continuing education and graduate medical education at Harvard Medical School.

Rosenbaum, chief of psychiatry at MGH, has won the C. Charles Burlingame Award from the Institute of Living in Hartford. He specializes in treatment-resistant mood and anxiety disorders, focusing on drug treatments for those conditions.

A prestigious scientific panel yesterday urged the government to ban soft drinks, sugary snacks and other junk food from schools, saying the typical fare available in vending machines, at snack bars, and at class birthday parties is contributing to the growing obesity of America's children.

A new prostate cancer test that relies on measuring levels of a blood protein called EPCA-2 accurately found cancer 94 percent of the time, a significant improvement over the current PSA test, according to a study released yesterday.

The Army said yesterday that it was hiring case managers and boosting oversight at military facilities, an announcement made after a new internal review concluded poor outpatient care extended beyond Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

If Boston and Cambridge have one of the densest clusters of biotech companies and academic labs in the country, a television studio at WGBH tonight was even more concentrated with about a hundred scientists, life science entrepreneurs and the people who want to keep them here.

The occasion was a live show hosted by Emily Rooney of Channel 2's "Greater Boston" and Lisa Mullins of the WGBH radio program "The World" for the Science City Summit, part of the 10-day Cambridge Science Festival.

They and their panelists asked why Boston and Cambridge have been such fertile ground for discoveries and businesses, and how the cities can keep their edge in innovation while the labor force is dwindling and housing prices are climbing out of reach.

Lunch in the doctor's office courtesy of pharmaceutical company reps and payments to physicians who speak at conferences aren't new, but the proportion of physicians reporting that they get money from industry and how that varies by specialty may be important for efforts to control these relationships, according to an article in tomorrow's New England Journal of Medicine.

Researchers at the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School conducted a national survey of 3,167 physicians and found that 94 percent had some kind of relationship with the pharmaceutical or medical device industries. The respondents reported receiving drug samples (78 percent), gifts of food (83 percent) and sports or cultural event tickets (7 percent). More than a third (35 percent) received reimbursement for continuing medical education or meeting expenses.

More than a quarter (28 percent) got paid for consulting, serving on an advisory board or speakers bureau, or enrolling patients in clinical trials. This surprised the authors more than the 94 percent of doctors with some sort of tie, which could have been as little as a mug or pen, Dr. David Blumenthal said.

"I figured that direct payments went pretty much to people who were academic or opinion leaders, but it seemed to be far more common," he said in an interview. "The fact that more than a quarter of physicians are actually getting direct monetary payments tells me this remains an important phenomenon in American medicine and that the rules and regulations put into effect have not eliminated it."

By Alice Dembner, Globe Staff

Daily doses of the anti-inflammatory drugs Aleve or Celebrex did not prevent Alzheimer's in a national study published online today that included 424 people in the Greater Boston area.

But the government-funded study is far from definitive, because the drugs were given to people late in life and because the study was halted midway amid concerns that the drugs were linked to higher rates of heart disease.

The lack of a prevention benefit wasn't the only bad news in the study. There were hints that the pills "may even accelerate the appearance of the disease," said Dr. Robert C. Green of Boston University, who directed the Boston arm of the study.

The study, designed to last seven years, was stopped in its fourth year. Many of the participants had only taken the drugs for two years.

The results, published in the journal Neurology, were based on 2,128 people age 70 or older with a family history of Alzheimer's.

Researchers still hold out the possibility that other anti-inflammatory drugs, taken at an earlier age, might prevent dementia, but they urged individuals not to take these pills for that purpose.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

A leading legislative voice on health affairs today applauded public-health authorities for moving to scrap restrictions on stem-cell research -- and took some not-so-subtle swipes at the former administration of Mitt Romney.

State Representative Peter J. Koutoujian, chairman of the House Committee on Public Health, urged the state's Public Health Council to follow the recommendation of administrators to abandon stem-cell regulations adopted last August under the Romney administration. Governor Deval Patrick last month also decried the restrictions.

"It is wonderful to be working with a new administration with a commitment to public health," said Koutoujian, a Waltham Democrat. And he said that as the Public Health Council considers rolling back the restriction, it should engage in a discussion driven by scientific evidence "rather than one that would be pressured by an external political agenda."

Faithful readers of Dr. Flea's blog know the Boston-area pediatrician is preparing to testify in a malpractice trial. He doesn't divulge details of the case, but in his latest post he does share lessons from his lawyers, complete with diagrams of the courtroom.

He tells us where the jury experts say he should look (first at the plaintiff's lawyer, then at the jury), how he should hold his hands (folded in his lap) and how he should speak (slowly, no more than three sentences at a time).

"Finally, Flea was given a DVD of his screen test and a script to practice the head turning and slow-question-answering-thing daily until trial date," he writes.

The state Department of Public Health will propose this morning the scrapping of restrictions on stem cell research that generated widespread concern among scientists who feared criminal penalties for conducting certain kinds of laboratory work.

A large contingent of House lawmakers, led by a top lieutenant to House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi, is demanding that Governor Deval Patrick reinstate Gerald Morrissey, the commissioner of the Department of Mental Retardation.

Thousands of hogs in at least five states and poultry at a Missouri farm ate salvage pet food that had been laced with an industrial chemical, the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday, opening potential avenues for the contaminant to enter the human food supply.

While the new vaccine Prevnar has all but eradicated common causes of pneumonia, meningitis, and ear infections in children, new strains of bacteria not covered by the vaccine have emerged, US researchers said yesterday.

Injured soldiers and veterans grappling with Veterans Affairs backlogs and red tape will now fill out less paperwork, get more screenings for brain injury, and go through an improved disability claims system, a presidential task force said yesterday.

Kevin Phelan lasted only one week after being named chairman of Caritas Christi Health Care System. His sin: wanting to replace Wilson D. Rogers Jr., the hospital's controversial long time lawyer and his firm, columnist Steve Bailey writes.

Age-related macular degeneration is the most common cause of vision loss in people over 60, but only some of the people who have the early or intermediate stages of the eye disease develop its more serious form, losing so much of their central vision that they can no longer drive or read.

Researchers led by Dr. Johanna M. Seddon of Tufts-New England Medical Center report in tomorrow’s Journal of the American Medical Association that people with variations in two common genes have a two- to four-times higher risk of developing advanced AMD. When combined with smoking and obesity, already known risk factors for advanced AMD, the gene variations pushed the risk of advanced AMD 19 times higher.

"We have shown how genetic variations do add to progression," Seddon said in an interview about the clinical trial, which followed 1,466 people for about six years. "Genetic factors, smoking and obesity are all independent factors related to progression of AMD and they seem to be additive."

The anti-angina medication ranolazine safely eased chest pain in a large clinical trial led by Brigham and Women's Hospital researchers, but the drug did not make a significant difference in whether people with coronary artery disease had another heart attack or died, according to a report in tomorrow's Journal of the American Medical Association.

"It does not prolong life, but it provides important relief of symptoms," lead author Dr. David A. Morrow said in an interview.

On Lab Life at Nature Network Boston, virology Ph.D. student Anna Kushnir describes getting used to mice as pieces of lab equipment that try to bite her.

"Curiously enough, my comfort with mice and mouse work does not extend beyond the lab," she writes.

On Nurse at small, Betsy Baumgartner asks about dress codes for doctors in light of conversations about uniforms for nurses at the Boston teaching hospital where she works.

"Just tonight there was a resident up on the floor reading a chart with his iPod on, visibly in both ears, while wearing a running jacket over his scrubs," she writes. "How unprofessional is that!"

On WBUR's CommonHealth, Andrew Dreyfus, executive vice president for health care services for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, argues that other states can do what Massachusetts is doing under its new healthcare law.

"Each state can try to capture the significant amount of money spent to care for the uninsured and use it to support coverage for low wage workers and others who cannot afford health insurance," he writes. "We are demonstrating that health care reform -– despite its infamous complexity -- does not defy solutions."

Dr. Susan L. Lindquist (left), a member and former director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies how molecular proteins change shape in cell division. The process, called protein folding, can — when it goes wrong — lead to diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. She is also a founder of FoldRx Pharmaceuticals, a startup biotechnology company seeking to develop drugs to fight Parkinson’s.

In a Q and A in today's New York Times, she explains why she works in yeast and the path she followed to a life in science.

"I have to tell you that the sheer intellectual joy of finding out how life works is really cool," she said.

Abortions and miscarriages do not raise the risk of breast cancer, despite claims by some groups and some studies that suggest they do, researchers said yesterday.

Some prisoners executed by lethal injection in the United States may die of suffocation while they are still conscious and in pain, University of Miami researchers said yesterday in a study that concluded the drugs do not work as intended.

There are no empty hospital beds in Somalia's bloodstained capital, and barely enough bandages to patch up the wounded. Even bottles of medicine are running dry.

Overweight workers cost their bosses more in injury claims than their lean colleagues, suggests a study that found the heaviest employees had twice the rate of workers' compensation claims as their fit co-workers.

The New England Journal of Medicine has banned a prominent Columbia University cardiologist from its pages for five years for reportedly jumping the gun on the release of embargoed information to be published about a major heart study, the New York Times said in a story today.

Dr. Martin B. Leon is said to have commented on a study in the journal about how well coronary stents work compared with drugs in treating chest pain -- a study that he knew about because he had reviewed it for the journal. According to an account in www.theheart.org, the Times story says, Leon made the remarks at a conference of heart doctors on March 25, two days before the journal planned to disclose the information.

Though he didn't release the study's findings, Leon criticized the study's design.

The ban means he cannot review manuscripts by other researchers or have his own work appear in the journal, the story said.

By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff

The data are so fresh and preliminary that researchers have not submitted a paper to a scientific journal yet. But Pamela Sklar, a geneticist at the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital, said yesterday that new genome scans have identified a crop of previously unsuspected genes that -– at first glance, at least -– may be connected to bipolar disorder.

Sklar spoke to the Boston Mental Health Research Symposium at the Boston Harbor Hotel, an event sponsored by NARSAD -– The Mental Health Research Association, a major funder of research on mental illness. The results are far from definitive, she said, and need to be replicated.

Sklar and others are taking advantage of rapid advances in gene-scanning technology to try to find the elusive genes for bipolar disorder –- which is believed to affect about 1 percent of the population -– as well as schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.

By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff

The New England Journal of Medicine this afternoon published online two commentaries and an editorial critical of the US Supreme Court's decision last week upholding the federal ban on the abortion procedure that opponents call "partial-birth abortion."

"With this decision the Supreme Court has sanctioned the intrusion of legislation into the day-to-day practice of medicine," writes Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, the Boston-based journal's editor-in-chief. Physicians are open to oversight and discussion of delicate matters, he says, but those discussions should occur "among informed and knowledgable people who are acting in the best interests of a specific patient."

The political ruckus over Terri Schiavo in 2005 demonstrated "the disastrous consequences of congressional interference" in a medical case, Drazen writes. And now, "the judicial branch has regrettably joined the legislative branch in practicing medicine without a licence."

Dr. Michael F. Greene, director of obstetrics at Massachusetts General Hospital, writes in another piece that the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the ban "creates an intimidating environment" around second-trimester abortions. The result may be that doctors will feel too scared of prosecution to perform such abortions, even if the mother’s life is in jeopardy, he writes.

"Both health care providers and patients should be alarmed by the current degree of intrusion by our government into the practice of medicine," Greene writes.

There is mounting scientific evidence of advertising's culpability in the nation's obesity epidemic -- and intensifying pledges to do something about it.

As if the images of injured students and mourning families and the gunman's own video were not disturbing enough during the day, for many people, the killings at Virginia Tech may continue to haunt them after they turn off the light.

Earlier this year, two psychiatric residents from Massachusetts General Hospital traveled to an Addis Ababa hospital as the first participants in a program set up by the hospitals to ease the burden on Ethiopia's doctors and to help teach the country's newest psychiatry residents -- all three of them.

Also in Health/Science, meet science historian Janet Browne, learn about the difference between estrogen patches and pills and ice melting at the North and South poles.

In Business, Massachusetts hospitals and community health centers are launching a drive to educate business owners and employees, particularly at smaller firms, about the significant responsibilities and costs they will face under the state's mandatory health insurance expansion.

Short White Coat is our new blog, written by first-year Harvard medical student Ishani Ganguli. Ishani's posts will appear here, as part of White Coat Notes. E-mail Ishani at shortwhitecoat@gmail.com.

By now the statistics, and the photos that bring them to life, are familiar but no less jarring: Ten million people die each year from preventable and treatable causes -— mostly infectious diseases long forgotten in the developed world. Developing nations account for 90 percent of global deaths but only 10 percent of pharmaceutical sales each year, in large part because drugs aren’t affordable.

Our spring course on Social Medicine switched this year from elective to mandatory as testament to a growing emphasis on humanism in medicine. Headed up by such global health celebrities as Jim Kim and Paul Farmer, the class tends to be focused accordingly, on problems in the developing world.

On Thursday afternoons, Farmer or Kim, co-founders of Partners in Health, stand behind the podium, present such statistics, and ask us what we can do to solve these problems in an earnest tone that suggests that even they, despite their decades of dedication to the cause, have little idea.

Sitting in the lecture hall, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and inadequate in the face of such challenges. But as our professors -- who began their global health work when they were classmates at Harvard Medical School -- know, students have a unique drive and capacity to effect change, especially on their home turf.

This week's Science includes a special section on germ cells -- the reproductive cells of an organism.

George Q. Daley of Children's Hospital Boston, Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute asks whether the cup is half empty or half full for embryonic stem cells.

David C. Page of the Whitehead Institute and MIT considers the mysteries of sexual identity from the germ cell's perspective.

Alexander F. Schier of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT writes about the death and birth of RNAs during the maternal-zygotic transition.

Also in Science, Rachael L. Neve of Harvard and McLean Hospital is an author of a new study in mice about neurons competing to encode a memory in the brain.

The emotional toll on students, faculty, and staff at Virginia Tech, where student Seung-Hui Cho shot classmates and faculty before killing himself, will last for decades, predicted those who have counseled survivors of past shootings on college campuses.

Teachers and fellow students were horrified by Seung-Hui Cho’s violent screenplays — bizarre tales of suburban mothers brandishing chain saws and high school teachers raping their students. But psychologists and psychiatrists say such stuff is no indicator of imminent violence like Cho’s murderous rampage at Virginia Tech.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

A coalition leading the fight against obesity in Boston won a $500,000 grant today, money that will be used to draft a citywide battle plan and to expand public space for physical activity.

The two-year grant was awarded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to the Boston Food and Fitness Collaborative, a 52-member association that includes hospitals and health centers, city agencies, and activist groups. The collaborative intends to make affordable produce available to residents as well as improve walking and bicycling trails, according to the office of Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

In two years, the coalition could receive an addition $3.5 million from the Kellogg Foundation to further implement strategies emerging from the citywide plan to combat obesity.

By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff

The Board of Registration in Medicine has disciplined two physicians, Dr. Matthew Cushing Jr. and Dr. Douglas M. Katz.

The board revoked Cushing's license, following a similar action by the California Medical Board in 2004 over his treatment of a patient who later died of an overdose. No Massachusetts office was listed for Cushing, whose specialty is internal medicine.

The board reprimanded Katz, a 1987 graduate of the School of Medicine, State University of New York, for "engaging in communication" with a patient whose tattoo he removed "designed to foster a personal relationship beyond the boundaries of a doctor/patient relationship."

Katz, who is board certified in internal medicine, practices in Peabody and is affiliated with Lahey Clinic and Union Hospital.

By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff

Children's Hospital Boston and Caritas Christi Health Care today announced an affiliation agreement in which Children's Hospital doctors will provide care at three Caritas nurseries for sick babies.

Children's physicians will staff the neonatal intensive care unit at Caritas St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston and the special care nurseries at Caritas Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton and Caritas Holy Family Hospital and Medical Center in Methuen.

The agreement provides a guarantee to Caritas that it won't encounter a shortage of specialists to staff its nurseries and the opportunity to associate itself with the prestigious Harvard teaching hospital.

Children's, which will care for the sickest children at its own neonatal intensive care unit, extends its reach to a new group of potential patients.

The Supreme Court voted yesterday to uphold a national ban on the procedure opponents call "partial-birth abortion," marking the first time the court has allowed a ban on any type of abortion without a broad exception to protect a woman's health.

In recent years, universities have been trying to weave stronger nets to catch students who are potentially dangerous to themselves and others. But even so, college officials and mental health specialists say that some -- like Virginia Tech's Seung-Hui Cho -- may still slip through. From big-name private colleges to small public schools, universities are focusing on student mental health as never before.

New federal statistics provide powerful evidence that the sharp drop in hormone use by menopausal women that began in 2002 caused a dramatic decline in breast cancer cases, according to an analysis being published today.

Massachusetts General Hospital yesterday sold its rights to royalties on foreign sales of the rheumatoid arthritis drug Enbrel (left) for $284 million, a move that eliminates its exposure to market risk and will help it build a research endowment.

Add a seasonal flu shot to the list of medicines that can help prevent heart attack deaths, according to a study in the European Heart Journal.

Even if we think we can agree on various groupings called races, we should understand the limits of how well they can help define health differences, Sally Lehrman, who reports on health and science for Scientific American and the radio documentary series "The DNA Files," writes on the op-ed page.

By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff

Massachusetts General Hospital has received a $35 million donation for its burn unit and emergency department from media mogul Sumner Redstone, the largest single gift in the hospital's history.

Redstone, who nearly died in a 1979 Boston hotel fire and was treated for third-degree burns at Mass. General, has a long history with the hospital and has made previous donations to the burn unit. Of the current gift, $20 million will go toward research in burn and trauma care and a renovation of the unit.


Sumner Redstone (left) and Clint Eastwood, arriving at this year's Academy Awards, in February.

The hospital will use the remaining $15 million to improve access in the emergency department, which will be re-named The Sumner M. Redstone Emergency Department. Mass. General president Dr. Peter Slavin said that since many burn patients are stabilized in the emergency room, Redstone saw helping that department as a natural extension of his relationship with the burn unit.

The emergency department is struggling to care for a growing number of patients, many of whom experience long waits for care or for hospital beds. The donation will pay for various stages of expansion of the ER, including four new triage rooms that will allow doctors to evaluate patients immediately when they arrive and begin tests sooner.

The hospital also plans a significant expansion of the ER as part of a multi-million new building that it plans to complete in 2011. That renovation will add another three triage rooms, a pediatric waiting area, and increase the number of patient bays from 44 to 60, said Dr. Alasdair Conn, chief of emergency services.

Redstone, 83, whose net worth is estimated at $7.5 billion by Forbes magazine, also is giving $35 million to Cedars-Sinai Prostate Cancer Center in Los Angeles and FasterCures/The Center for Accelerating Medical Solutions in Washington, D.C.

"Advancements in research and medical science are creating a better world and a higher quality of life for all of us. Like many, I have personally benefited from these advancements," Redstone said in a statement.

Wire services contributed to this story.

By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff

In a new paper, Dr. Harrison Pope of Harvard’s McLean Hospital is accusing federal researchers of causing undue alarm by greatly overestimating the number of teenage girls who take anabolic steroids.

A 2003 federal survey found that 7.3 percent of 9th-grade girls had used "illegal steroids." But Pope says that a confusing question may have prompted girls to report taking steroids even if they had actually only taken asthma medication, health-food supplements and the like.

The survey question asked teenagers if they had ever taken “steroid pills or shots without a doctor’s prescription.” It would have been better if the question had been more specific, naming steroids like testosterone and Dianabol, Pope says. His paper appears in the new issue of the journal “Drug and Alcohol Dependence.”

US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official Laura Kann defends the survey, and says that its findings on steroids were “not inconsistent with what some surveys have shown.” Was there a glitch in the data? “I don’t have any reason to think that, no,” she said.

Pope estimates that perhaps only one-tenth of 1 percent of teenaged girls take anabolic steroids; the drugs can have masculinizing effects such as increased body hair.

By Scott Allen, Globe Staff

Nurses at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute yesterday approved a contract that will make them the highest paid nurses in New England, according to the Massachusetts Nurses Association, with senior nurses making more than $140,000 a year by 2009.

The three-year contract, settled after only five bargaining sessions, will give the cancer center's 225 nurses cumulative pay increases of from 9 to 23 percent, depending on their specialty and experience, the union said. A fulltime registered nurse with 15 years experience would make $67.78 an hour, which translates to $141,000 annually.

Nurses at most other teaching hospitals in Boston make at least several dollars an hour less, according to the nurses association.

"The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is an awesome place to work and they really value their nurses," said Kathleen McDermott, the Dana-Farber nurse who chaired the bargaining committee for the nurses' association. "They have a lot of very experienced nurses and they ... want to keep us."

Officials at Dana-Farber also praised the new contract. "We value our nurses, their skill and the high quality of care they provide our patients and their families," said Patricia Reid Ponte, senior vice president for patient care services and chief of nursing at the hospital.

John Lacey leaves his post as associate director of public affairs for media relations at Harvard Medical School today to become director of communications at the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council on April 30. No replacement has been named for Lacey, who held the Harvard job for 7 years.

John Lacey

By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff

Public Citizen, Ralph Nader's consumer advocacy group, today rated Massachusetts as having the best Medicaid program in the country.

The organization gave Massachusetts 650 out of 1,000 points, ranking the state in four areas: eligibility, scope of services, quality of care and provider reimbursement. Massachusetts ranked 1st in quality of care, based on good nurse staffing in nursing homes, the high percent of infants who've been immunized and other factors. But the state ranked just 23rd in provider reimbursement.

Public Citizen's data went up to January 2006, so some of the impact of the state's new health insurance law may not be reflected in the rankings in individual categories.

Cambridge has named Claude-Alix Jacob (left) chief public health officer for the city and director of the Cambridge Public Health Department.

Jacob had been deputy director of the Office of Health Promotion at the Illinois Department of Public Health and before that he was chief of the Bureau of Disease Prevention and Control at the Baltimore City Health Department. He earned a master’s degree in public health from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Jacob will take over from interim health director Dr. Karen Hacker, who was appointed in July after Harold D. Cox stepped down to become associate dean for public health practice at Boston University's School of Public Health.

The Cambridge Public Health Department is a municipal health agency operated by Cambridge Health Alliance through a contract with the City of Cambridge.

Authors of a new analysis of antidepressants for children and teenagers say the benefits of treatment trump the small risk of increasing some patients' chances of having suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

For-profit dialysis chains in the United States give patients larger doses of the expensive antianemia drug Epogen compared to nonprofit clinics, according to a study to be published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Under criticism for poor treatment of injured soldiers, the Pentagon announced new measures yesterday to provide more health screenings, improve its record keeping system, and simplify an unwieldy disability claims system.

The Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, charged with establishing rules for the state's healthcare law, needs to tackle extending coverage to the 60,000 residents who are exempted from the mandate and to ensure that those required to purchase insurance, especially the low-premium plans, actually benefit from their coverage, Mark Rukavina and Carol Pryor of the national healthcare access advocacy group The Access Project write in an opinion piece.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's marketing department already looked a little like Channel 5 with the arrival of former senior health producer Rhonda Mann and former writer and news producer Zineb Marchoudi in January.

But now the television station's website, www.thebostonchannel.com, is looking a little like the hospital with former news anchor Heather Kahn's (left) arrival as a Beth Israel spokeswoman for a sponsored spot on the WCVB health page.

Outlined in purple, the monthly BIDMC "Hot Health Topic" and video from Kahn appear on either side of Channel 5 news stories - making it hard to tell where the ads end and the news begins.

The online feature debuted yesterday with text reports about weight-loss surgery written by Mann, the hospital's marketing director, and a patient's video story told by Kahn.

Kahn, who used to work with Mann on WCVB's health unit and now lives in Philadelphia, will also appear in television spots promoting the venture, the hospital said. The videos are shot at the station's studios in Needham.

Channel 5 also has sponsored arrangements with Mount Auburn Hospital and Tufts Health Plan, whose advertisements appear on the health page.

Flea, a Boston-area pediatrician-blogger, answers a vehement "no" to this article's title in Pediatrics: "Do All Infants With Apparent Life-Threatening Events Need to Be Admitted?"

But that doesn't mean they aren't.

"In the real world, evidence-based medicine often doesn't make a dime's worth of difference," he writes. "It doesn't matter to parents and it doesn't even matter to some of Flea's colleagues. This is especially true in the current climate of over-test, over-diagnose, over-treat, and over-admit."

On Kevin, M.D., Nashua pediatrician Dr. Kevin Pho posts a link to the American Academy of Pediatrics' concern about the cost of new vaccines Gardasil, against cervical cancer vaccine ($360), and RotaTeq, against diarrhea-causing rotavirus ($190).

Via Nature Network Boston, Alex Palazzo of Harvard Medical School and the Daily Transcript is putting out the word to 29 RNA labs in the Boston area to meet for a monthly informal data seminar to be called the Boston RNA Data Club. Something like the Boston Area Yeast Meeting at the Whitehead, Nature Network's Corie Lok notes.

Teaching patients how to monitor and manage their chronic illnesses can not only lower costs but improve quality of care, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and MIT say.

In an essay in this week's Public Library of Science Medicine, Harold J. DeMonaco of MGH and Eric von Hippel of MIT review the medical literature on self-management tools for type 1 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart failure, depression and asthma.

They ask why the methods patients use to take care of their own diabetes -- monitoring blood sugar, injecting insulin, evaluating how well they are doing and adjusting dosage -- can't be expanded to other conditions. In one study they cite, patients with hypertension successfully used home monitors to lower their blood pressure and stay on their medications.

"We propose that the time has come for health systems to support appropriate and appropriately timed shifts from practitioner-based care to patient self-management," they write.

Can this work? Let White Coat Notes know what you think at whitecoat@globe.com

Two years ago, a group of doctors founded an organization with the goal of making lifestyle medicine -- how daily habits affect health -- a credentialed clinical specialty and a part of basic medical training, according to a story in today's New York Times. Now the group, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, has a new publication, The American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine.

"We know lifestyle interventions can be very powerful," often more effective than drugs or surgery, said Dr. JoAnn Manson, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s School of Public Health and a member of the editorial board of the new journal. "But we need to provide the scientific evidence on how to incorporate that knowledge into practice."

Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and a member of the lifestyle medicine college’s board of advisers, said primary caregivers should be trained in lifestyle medicine.
Dr. Thomas W. Rowland, chief of pediatric cardiology at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, counters that the principles of lifestyle medicine should be at medicine's core and not a separate specialty.

Most physicians in the United States believe that religion and spirituality have a positive effect on patients’ health, according to a survey published last week in The Archives of Internal Medicine, and that God at least occasionally intervenes on their behalf, a story in today's New York Times says.

Dr. Jerome E. Groopman, a professor of medicine at Harvard who was not involved in the study, told the Times he was surprised by how many doctors believe in divine intervention.

"The most striking finding is the perception that God is micromanaging clinical outcomes at the bedside," said Groopman, the author of the new book "How Doctors Think" (Houghton Mifflin).

The Food and Drug Administration has lifted a warning letter that had been hanging over the Guidant division of Boston Scientific Corp., the medical-device maker said yesterday, freeing the Natick company to introduce products that had been blocked by quality-control problems.

One in four cancer patients given Amgen Inc.'s Aranesp anemia drug in a study died after 19 weeks, a rate about 5 points higher than among those on a placebo, a finding likely to make doctors more cautious about the product.

Conditions during yesterday's Boston Marathon weren't as drastic as predicted -- the temperature was higher -- but the wind, rain, and cold combined to make it a challenging race for medical personnel (left), who had prepared for the worst.

Retired Harvard University professor Frank H. Westheimer, a major force in 20th century chemistry who served as a science adviser to President Lyndon Johnson, died Saturday of natural causes at his home in Cambridge, relatives said yesterday. He was 95.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy is leading efforts in Congress to pass legislation to overhaul the Food and Drug Administration. Such reform is needed, but the proposed legislation is so weak that it is unlikely to save any lives, write Judy Norsigian, executive director of Our Bodies Ourselves, and Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women & Families, in an opinion piece.

An FDA proposal to ban anyone with a financial interest of $50,000 or greater from taking part in an FDA advisory panel is a vain political effort to placate the medical journal editors, ethicists, and bureaucrats who enforce conflict-of-interest regulations, writes Dr. Thomas P. Stossel of Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women's Hospital on the op-ed page.

By Judy Foreman, Globe Correspondent

Larry Haydu, 56, a licensed clinical social worker from Sudbury, finished yesterday’s marathon in 6 hours and 17 minutes.

Haydu, the subject of a story in today's Globe, trained and ran the marathon despite having had a heart attack 13 years ago.

He was part of a Tufts University research project to see if average people could go from completely sedentary to super fit in about 10 months.

Miriam Nelson, a Tufts nutritionist and the project's chief scientific consultant, said she spoke with Haydu shortly after he finished his run.

"He looked great," she said. I think he was really happy with his race."

Boston University's Albert and Jessie Danielsen Institute has won one of two Templeton Research Lectures grants for its proposed project "Religious and Psychological Well-being."

The project grants, which last up to four years and provide up to $500,000, are designed to promote discussion about science and religion through interdisciplinary study groups and annual lectureships, according to the Metanexus Institute, the organization that makes the grants for the Templeton Foundation. Johns Hopkins University won the other grant for 2007.

Robert C. Neville, executive director of the Danielsen Institute at BU and a professor of philosophy, religion and theology, said he will form a research group that includes people from psychology, medicine, education, religious studies and theology.

The Boston-based Massachusetts Medical Interpreters Association has changed its name to the International Medical Interpreters Association, reflecting an expanded mission to decrease healthcare disparities worldwide by improving communication between healthcare providers and patients, the group said.

The 1,500-member nonprofit group said it seeks to grow through a network of international interpreter associations and chapters in other countries.

"We will now be able to join forces with other associations around the world, to help develop an international code of ethics, standards of practice and quality controls for medical interpreters, and to facilitate the cross-continental exchange of knowledge in the language services industry," Izabel S. Arocha, the group's president, said in a statement.

Three Massachusetts hospitals have been named among the country's top 100 integrated health networks -- hospital systems that operate as a unified group.

Baystate Health System in Springfield was ranked 31st, Cambridge Health Alliance came in 49th and Lahey Clinic in Burlington finished 85th in the ratings released by Verispan. There were 587 hospital networks considered.

The healthcare information company said it surveyed health systems about patient access, clinical quality, physicians and the use of technology.

Scientists from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital have been honored with collaborators from the University of Michigan for their discoveries about the genetics of prostate cancer.

The American Association for Cancer Research chose the team from about 30 applicants, the organization said. The researchers will share a prize of $50,000.

The Harvard members are Dr. Mark A. Rubin, Charles Lee, Dr. Sven Perner and Francesca Demichelis.

Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT are part of a team that has discovered new genetic risk factors for Crohn's disease.

Reporting in the online Nature Genetics, they identify new genes that are involved in the immune system's response to bacteria. Crohn's disease, which affects about half a million Americans, is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease.

The authors include John D. Rioux, who has moved from the Broad to the Universite de Montreal, Ramnik J. Xavier, Alan Huett and Petric Kuballa of MGH, Todd Green of the Broad, and Mark J. Daly of the Broad and MGH.

Short White Coat is our new blog, written by first-year Harvard medical student Ishani Ganguli. Ishani's posts will appear here, as part of White Coat Notes. E-mail Ishani at shortwhitecoat@gmail.com.

Who says medical school can’t be fun? I’m taking Human Sexuality in Medicine, a spring elective meant to supply future doctors with the knowledge and vocabulary to discuss this sometimes uncomfortable subject with patients. In previous weeks we’ve covered the anatomy and physiology of it, as well as what can go wrong.

During Thursday’s session, a sex therapist with effusive gesturing habits shared her experiences in the field with our predominantly female classroom.

Lessons learned: Talk to each member of a couple individually to root out the cause of complaints in the bedroom. Don’t be afraid to talk methods. And even 85-year-olds have concerns about sex (so ask).

Eric S. Lander (left), founding director of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and a leader of the Human Genome Project, has won the 2007 Society for Biomolecular Sciences Achievement Award for his study of genes and how they function in health and disease.

He will receive the award, which carries a $5,000 honorarium, and present a talk called "Beyond the Human Genome" at this week's SBS meeting in Montreal. Past recipients have included Stuart L. Schreiber, also of the Broad, in 2004.

On Running a Hospital, Paul Levy says Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has joined Boston Children’s Hospital, Tufts-New England Medical Center and MGH in offering a pet therapy program. Trained dogs and volunteers visit patients who give written consent. A dozen comments include praise as well as concern about allergies, infection and fears, plus Levy's replies with hospital policies on screening for the therapy dogs.

In the next post down, Levy vents frustration over hand hygiene stats at the hospital that show some improvement but not enough.

"Trust me, the irony of putting these two posts next to each other was not lost on me," he writes.

On Nature Network Boston, Harvard virology graduate student Anna Kushnir lists her favorite dumb movie science moments and invites more.

"When I think about the fact that I have spent 23/28ths of my life in school, I have difficulty controlling my gag reflex," she writes. "However, the (exceedingly) rare swells of intellectual superiority I experience when watching really (really) dumb movies make those 23 years worth it."

From nature walks to rocket launches to the world’s first scale model of the human genome, Cambridge celebrates its best April 21 through 29 in the Cambridge Science Festival, led by the MIT Museum.

Larry Haydu (left), 56, who had a heart attack at 43 and was almost completely sedentary until last summer, will run the Boston Marathon today. He and 11 teammates are running as part of an experiment dreamed up by exercise physiologists and nutritionists at Tufts University and the television program "Nova." Check back later today to see how Haydu fared.

Also in Health/Science, meet MIT bioengineer Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia, ponder cloud color, consider antidepressants and read about studies on ALS insights and a link between Tai Chi and shingles (second item).

In World news, A 350-strong US military task force of medical reservists called New Horizons last month spent two weeks bivouacked in the remote jungle in Panama, buffing the image of the United States as they help the poor.

In Business & Innovation, lobbyists take aim at generic biologics and New York City will buy electronic medical records software systems from eClinicalWorks of Westborough.

Some Massachusetts hospitals have started paying surgeons and other medical specialists up to $1,000 for "on call" emergency room shifts, breaking with decades of medical tradition, the Sunday Globe reports.

Harvard researchers including Dr. Todd R. Golub report in PLoS Medicine, the online Public Library of Science journal, that, using a molecular biology technique called microarray expression profiling (an example of a detail is at left), they were able to identify compounds that could target genes involved in Ewing sarcoma, the second most common childhood cancer of bone and soft tissue.

In the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Dr. Alan D'Andrea and colleagues at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute show a new therapeutic target for the treatment of Fanconi anemia, which carries the risk of cancer and bone-marrow failure.

Also in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Dr. Rong Tian and colleagues from Brigham and Women's Hospital report that in mice, mutations in a protein that triggers cells to generate more energy are associated with heart failure.

A Healthy Blog points the way to a new website launched with the Massachusetts Hospital Association and the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers to provide information and outreach materials about the state's new healthcare law.

On Running a Hospital, Beth Israel CEO Paul Levy reveals an interesting pattern that a hospital staffer noticed about patients who fall at the end of their stays, when they sitting on the edge of their hospital beds, dressed to go home.

"We think that our staff members were receiving a subliminal message: They would see a healthy, dressed person in the room and might not have paid the same degree of attention to the patient as they would have an hour earlier when he or she might have been sitting on the edge of the bed in a hospital gown," he wrote. "Slight dizziness or instability of this person would then lead to the fall."

The state's mental health system for children is clogged with some of its worst backups in years, leading to long emergency room waits and a record number of "stuck kids" who are deemed well enough to leave hospital units but have nowhere to go.

Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea is spreading rapidly across the United States, federal health officials reported yesterday, raising alarm about doctors' ability to treat the common sexually transmitted infection.

The Army might be shortchanging injured soldiers by rating the severity of their disabilities with a system that is both unwieldy and inconsistent, the head of a special commission said yesterday.

Scientists have unraveled the DNA of another of our primate relatives, this time a monkey named the rhesus macaque -- and the work has far more immediate impact than just to study evolution.

British researchers have produced the first clear evidence for a gene common in the population that dictates why some people gain excess weight while others do not.

Merck & Co.'s experimental arthritis drug Arcoxia shouldn't be allowed on the US market, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel said, citing some of the same risks that led to the withdrawal of the similar treatment Vioxx.

By James Vaznis, Globe Staff

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst will bring back its undergraduate degree in public health sciences this fall.

The degree should help meet a growing demand for public health workers to respond to pandemics, bio-terrorism, and other public health crisis. The university dropped the degree in 1989 to focus on its graduate programs in public health.

The state Board of Higher Education is expected to approve the program at its meeting next week. UMass already has started to admit students.

Brandeis University is the only other Massachusetts college that offers an undergraduate major in public health, according to the state board.

By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff

Scientists at Harvard Medical School have for the first time isolated and identified protein from a dinosaur -- a Tyrannosaurus rex that perished in Montana 68 million years ago and was partly preserved under tons of sandstone. Some of the protein identified in the Cretaceous era predator match that of modern-day chickens, the research revealed.

The findings, being published tomorrow in the journal Science, upset the long-held assumption that protein and other basic materials of life could not possibly survive in detectable amounts for more than a few hundred thousand years. They also raise the possibility that scientists might eventually recover DNA from prehistoric beasts, allowing for even more sophisticated analyses of ancient organisms and the processes of evolution.

"People are going to be looking differently at prehistoric bones because now we see they may carry tissue and information that nobody believed could still exist," said Mary H. Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University and a coauthor of both articles.

On Nature Network Boston, Corie Lok asks why there may be more attention paid to gender equity than racial equity at MIT, in light of the February hunger strike by African-American scientist James L. Sherley. Sherley (at right in photo) alleges racism in denial of tenure. Last week MIT named a faculty committee to study the issue of race in faculty hiring and promotion.

"It’s a shame that Sherley had to go to such extremes to get the university to seriously study the issue of race," she writes. "While there was an existing committee on faculty diversity at MIT, it wasn’t able to come together to do a comprehensive study on minority faculty the way women faculty did successfully in the 1990s."

On Running a Hospital, Paul Levy posts the latest central line infection rates for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, measured in cases per thousand ICU patient days.

"The average over the last several months remains better than for the previous year, but the rate for February comes from two actual cases, worse than January and with 100 fewer patient days," he writes. "We treat them as sentinel events and try to learn what went wrong and why."

Kevin, M.D., links to an American College of Physicians story about how physicians dress.

"A patient suing over a post-surgical error said that she knew her surgeon wasn't focused on her because he came to her room in jeans, a T-shirt and athletic shoes," the story said.

By Alice Dembner, Globe Staff

A state board voted unanimously this morning to allow about 20 percent of the state’s uninsured adults to avoid buying insurance. A law requiring coverage for everyone who is not specifically exempted takes effect July 1.

The Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector board decided that even the lowest-cost insurance would not be affordable for about 68,000 individuals with low and moderate incomes.

The board also extended free coverage to individuals earning up to about $15,000 a year and families of 4 earning up to $31,000, and reduced the cost of insurance by $5 a month for those earning between $15,000 and $20,000 who are eligible for Commonwealth Care.

Board members yesterday said the moves were a compromise, designed to provide affordable coverage for 99 percent of the state’s population, but also provide an exception for those who would be truly burdened by the monthly premiums. People who are exempt will continue to be able to get emergency care through the state’s free care pool.

A person would be automatically exempted for example, if he or she earned about $33,000 and can’t find coverage for less than $150 a month. A family earning would be exempt, for example, if it earned up to $70,000 and could not find insurance premiums for $320 or less.

At at time when federal funding for scientific research is harder to come by, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is opening up a competition today to select 50 new investigators who will share $600 million for biomedical research.

For the first time scientists can apply directly to become HHMI investigators rather than needing their institutions to nominate them.

The researchers must belong to eligible institutions. In Massachusetts, 10 qualify: Boston Biomedical Research Institute, Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis University, Harvard Medical School and associated hospitals, Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory, MIT, Tufts University School of Medicine, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Potential presidential candidate Fred Thompson, known to millions of "Law & Order" viewers as a gruff district attorney, disclosed yesterday that he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a form of cancer, nearly three years ago.

A stubborn Senate voted yesterday to ease restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem cell research, ignoring President Bush's threat of a second veto on legislation designed to lead to new medical treatments.

A federal magistrate judge has found that the state has failed to provide adequate treatment and services for some 800 mentally retarded people in nursing homes, repeatedly violating a settlement agreement it made seven years ago to settle a class-action lawsuit.

Responding to residents' concerns, Winchester Hospital has scaled back a plan to build a new healthcare complex on Washington Street.

Money woes and Pentagon neglect are to blame for shoddy outpatient conditions and bureaucratic delays at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, an independent review has concluded.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The House Ways and Means Committee today dealt a serious setback to Governor Deval Patrick's proposal to significantly expand public health services, eliminating or scaling back several of the governor's key initiatives.

The House budget contains no money for cervical cancer vaccines for girls, while Patrick had proposed spending $12.5 million to inoculate about 42,000 11- and 12-year-olds.

"I'm disappointed," said John Auerbach, the state's new public health commissioner. "I believe that making the vaccine available would have been a valuable public health initiative, given the data that show that this vaccine can be very helpful in terms of preventing cancers."

The governor's call to substantially reinvigorate the state's decimated Tobacco Control Program was also dealt a blow: The House budget contains only $8.2 million for anti-smoking campaigns, compared with Patrick's request for $16.2 million.

Short White Coat is our new blog, written by first-year Harvard medical student Ishani Ganguli. Ishani's posts will appear here, as part of White Coat Notes. E-mail Ishani at shortwhitecoat@gmail.com.

The air around the medical school quad was rife with the promise of autumn and movie stars last week.

Brightly colored leaves were plastic—taped to the branches of budding trees lining the quad and strewn on the surrounding grass last Tuesday for the filming of a scene in Columbia Pictures' "21." But besides Jim Sturgess, the star, the other actors in the movie (including Kevin Spacey, Laurence Fishburne, and Kate Bosworth) were nowhere to be stalked.

"21" is directed by Legally Blonde’s Robert Luketic and based on the best-selling book "Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions." It turns out one of the six gets into Harvard Med at the end of the movie, so the film crew arrived here before dawn to recreate an autumn scene.

Slate's Book Club features a conversation between Dr. Jerome Groopman, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of "How Doctors Think," and Dr. Darshak Sanghavi, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who met Groopman when he was a fellow at Children's Hospital Boston.

"Algorithms and treatment guidelines are based on prototypes," Groopman writes. "They are not substitutes for individual thinking. And they break down when cases are atypical or complex."

Sanghavi, an occasional contributor to the Globe, summarizes their different points of view:

"This ultimately returns to our disagreement about standardizing medical care," he writes. "You feel it often constricts good medical practice; I think we don't have enough of it."

On Kevin, M.D., Dr. Kevin Pho, a Nashua primary care physician, wrestles with defensive medicine and how to keep it from driving health care costs higher and potentially harming patients.

"Defensive medicine is expensive, has no basis in evidence-based study, and exposes the patient to a host of complications," he writes. "Contrary to popular opinion, more medicine does not equal better medicine."

On Running a Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess CEO Paul Levy tells a college student that law degrees are best for people planning to become lawyers, not hoping to get better educated, and master's degrees in public health are not appreciated as much as they should be.

"I don't believe it ought to be the case, but the degree is sometimes not valued in hospital settings," he writes. "I think it is because hospitals are dominated by doctors, who often view an MPH as a poor substitute for a medical degree and think people who get one were not smart enough to get into medical school."

By Alice Dembner, Globe Staff

About 20 percent of uninsured adults would be exempted from meeting the state's new requirement that everyone have health insurance, under a proposal that will be voted on tomorrow by a state board.

The proposal, from the staff of the board overseeing implementation of the new universal health insurance law, estimates that even the lowest-cost insurance would not be affordable for about 68,000 individuals with low and moderate incomes.

In addition, the staff proposal would expand subsidies for the lowest-income families who qualify for a state-sponsored insurance program called Commonwealth Care.

This would extend free coverage to individuals earning up to about $15,000 a year and families of 4 earning up to $31,000. It would also reduce the cost of insurance by $5 a month for those earning between $15,000 and $20,000 who are eligible for Commonwealth Care.

The increased subsidies would cost the state about $13 million more than the $470 million estimated for the fiscal year that starts July 1.

"The proposal represents a reasonable way to determine generally whether insurance is affordable for most people," wrote Jon Kingsdale, executive director of the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector in a memo outlining the proposal to board members.

"If we do not find a way to oblige most individuals to participate, healthcare reform will fail to achieve its promise," he wrote. "However, we are walking a tightrope."

Cigarette sales in Massachusetts increased 3.2 percent last year even as usage continued to decline nationally, according to a report being released today that provides new evidence the state is losing ground in its battle against tobacco.

Researchers have demonstrated for the first time that the progression of Type-1 diabetes can be halted -- and possibly reversed -- by a stem cell transplant that preserves the body's diminishing ability to make insulin, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Some surgical residents at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston will be heading west to receive training at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, under a new affiliation agreement, the hospitals said yesterday.

Last April 12, Massachusetts enacted an ambitious, complex law to expand affordable health insurance to most of the state's half-million uninsured. One year later, how is it going? John E. McDonough, executive director of Health Care For All, gives his answer in an opinion piece.

Short White Coat is our new blog, written by first-year Harvard medical student Ishani Ganguli. Ishani's posts will appear here, as part of White Coat Notes.

Call it a testament to the media’s role in education, or total cluelessness on my part: I discovered today, when reading Liz Kowalczyk’s piece in the Globe on the white coat hierarchy and in a subsequent conversation with a fourth-year friend, that my classmates and I may be wearing the hip-length version of the white coat through our residency training and even as attending (senior) physicians. So much for the distinguishing mark of a medical student.

I will argue, however, that the true mark of a medical student can still be considered the wearing of said coat outside the hospital. Residents and even higher-up med students usually know better. While first-years are still enamored by the short-white look, my guess is that one wants to shed the garment as soon as possible after wearing it for twenty-four hours straight.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The former chief of the state's HIV/AIDS Bureau and a top United Way official were appointed assistant secretaries of health today by Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, Massachusetts's health secretary.

Jean McGuire, who was an assistant commissioner in the Department of Public Health from 1997 to 2003, is the new assistant secretary for disability policies and programs. McGuire presided over the AIDS division at the public health agency before leaving for a position at Northeastern University. Early in her career, McGuire's work focused on special education and rehabilitation of adults with significant disabilities.

Marilyn Anderson Chase will be assistant secretary for children, youth, and families. Chase spent 10 years as senior vice president for community impact at the United Way of Massachusetts Bay.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center rolled out its own ambulance service today with two vehicles to transport patients between its east and west campuses and from its hospital in Needham to the downtown medical center. A $250,000 gift from Robert and Carol Mayer of Chestnut Hill will pay for launching the service.

Beth Israel sends patients on 6,000 trips a year, just between its two campuses along Brookline Avenue, in "often complicated and costly transfers," the hospital said.

Most of the transfers -- 93 percent -- are to move patients to beds and the rest are for procedures and tests, hospital spokesman Jerry Berger said. The cost comes to more than $1 million a year.

Ambulance staff will be trained by Beth Israel and Cataldo Ambulance, and a dispatcher will work in the hospital’s emergency department, Dr. Mark Zeidel, chair of medicine, said in a hospital statement.

On Running a Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess CEO Paul Levy considers whether the variation in how care is delivered, particularly near the end of life, reflects "overuse, underuse, misuse, and waste in the health care system." He cites a Dartmouth study that said the amount of resources spent didn't change the outcomes, then wonders what should be done. He's gotten 16 answers so far.

On Nature Network Boston, Corie Lok writes about scientific fraud, from ignoring data that don’t fit to falsifying images.

When Montrealer Dr. Glenn Saxe first got to Boston to begin his residency in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, he thought he'd return home when his training was over, a story in today's Toronto Star says. But like so many of his Canadian counterparts – 12,040 Canadian-educated physicians live in the US – Saxe decided to stay once his training was complete.

"As I spent time in Boston and Harvard, there were more and more opportunities. More interesting and important research to get involved in," said Saxe, who is a specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder in children. "I met an American woman, married her and decided this was a place where I could really contribute."

One in nine Canadian-educated doctors who graduated last year is taking care of American patients, according to a new study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Short White Coat is our new blog, written by first-year Harvard medical student Ishani Ganguli. A short white coat is the hip-length garment worn by medical students to signify their place in the medical hierarchy. Ishani's posts will appear here, as part of White Coat Notes. E-mail Ishani at shortwhitecoat@gmail.com.

Under the mandate of Harvard Medical School's recently unveiled New Integrated Curriculum, my professors draw connections with fresh gusto, whether it is between disciplines or from benches to bedsides.

For one such integrated experience during my physiology course, I accompanied classmates to the intensive care unit at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center one day last month. Eight of us gathered in a meeting room outside the unit so that our professor could tell us about the patient we would observe and discuss, in an attempt to heighten our textbook appreciation of the lungs and kidneys.

As he finished describing a 45-year-old woman's unrelenting multi-organ failure and led us into her room, I mentally prepared myself for the sight. It wasn't my first time in the ICU -- I had been exposed as a candy-striper in high school -— but it was the first time I could bring any real medical knowledge to bear in such a setting, and it was a daunting prospect.

(Wiqan Ang for the Boston Globe)

White coats are everywhere in Boston's academic medical centers, a universal sign that the wearer is a medical professional. But look closer, and you will notice that not all white coats are alike.

Boston Scientific Corp. has notified doctors that some of its implantable heart defibrillators contain batteries that could deplete early, shortening the life span of the devices.

Dr. Paula Johnson (left), executive director of the Connors Center for Women's Health and Gender Biology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, describes her career path and the center's goals in a Saturday New York Times feature called "The Boss."

"People think of women’s health as mammograms and Pap smears besides general health care, but it’s much more," said Johnson, who is a cardiologist. "It’s understanding the science of sex differences and how that science influences the way we deliver care, both in the office and by means of highly technical procedures."

By Alice Dembner, Globe Staff

The state isn't yet doing enough to help people of low- and moderate incomes afford health insurance, a coalition of advocacy and medical groups told Governor Deval Patrick today.

The Affordable Care Today coalition, which helped secure passage of the state's health insurance law, called for the state to increase subsidies for those with the lowest incomes and to allow people with moderate incomes to opt out of the health insurance requirement if they would have to spend more than 4 to 8 percent of their income paying for it. Download file

The governor’s spokesman Kyle Sullivan, said that Patrick would review the proposal, along with others, as he seeks to strike a "delicate balance."

"He believes we must be ambitious in expanding coverage without imposing financial hardship on those who truly cannot afford health insurance," Sullivan said.

Charlie Baker, president and CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, has joined the blogging world with Let's Talk Health Care.

"Health insurance is a complicated topic," he wrote in his first post Friday. "I’m in the business, and I struggle at times to understand the benefits, the coverages, the rules and the jargon."

Cost is the dominant theme and the red HPHC shield is a prominent link to the company's products. A poll asks users if they've ever inquired about how much a treatment or test costs and an info center points to information about the new Massachusetts healthcare law, quality measures and how to save money on coverage.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have won a three-year, $4.2 million grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to study genes that may put people at risk for heart attacks, the hospital said.

Dr. David Altshuler, also a founding member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and Dr. Sek Katherisan will look at gene variations in 1,500 people who had heart attacks at an early age and 1,500 who did not. They will use data from a study started in 1998 at eight sites, including Mass. General, that make up the Myocardial Infarction Genetics Consortium.

In men under 50 and women under 60, genes may play a greater role in heart attacks, they said. Heart attacks cluster in certain families, regardless of traditional risk factors, but this inherited risk is not explained by gene variants already known to contribute to disease.

A licensing deal between Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a Florida biotechnology company to produce a "super" form of an anti-anemia drug is in danger of foundering just two years after it was signed.

As the creator of the first global center dedicated exclusively to health and human rights, at the Harvard School of Public Health, Countess Albina du Boisrouvray probably has as much hands-on experience in both as anyone. She's adopted the world's AIDS orphans as her cause.

Until recently, most experts believed that bed sores were an unambiguous indicator of bad care.

Also in Health/Science, the power of trash, Scrabble as a science and drug combinations.

In Business & Innovation, for Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., the future hinges on a potential billion-dollar drug for hepatitis C and a liver-research conference about to kick off 3,700 miles away in Spain where it will unveil new data from human trials of the pill.

In many ways, scientists’ hard-won and increasingly detailed understanding of what causes heart disease and what to do for it often goes unknown or ignored. A Sunday New York Times story follows a Brigham and Women's Hospital patient who did many things right, but also made some crucial miscalculations that were so common that nearly every patient makes them, cardiologists say.

On Nurse at small, Betsy Baumgartner, who works at a Boston teaching hospital, relates how patients react when she suggests they take Oxycodone (left) for pain.

"I'm still amazed at how many people are afraid to take this painkiller because of the media hype" about Oxycontin, she writes. "The funny part is that if you offer them Percocet they will gobble it right up without any questions!"

On Healthy Children, Dr. Stephen Parker of Boston Medical Center talks about methods for pain-free pediatrics - from skin-to-skin contact for newborns during procedures, to pet therapy for older hospitalized children, as well as anesthesia.

"Using some well-established (and some not-so-well-established) techniques to diminish the experience of pain, the screaming of kids in our emergency room and offices has markedly decreased," he writes.

This week in Science Express, researchers Gohta Goshima, Roy Wollman,
Ronald D. Vale and Nico Stuurman at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole report on a genome screen that revealed about 200 genes -- 150 of them previously unknown or unexpected -- that are involved in assembling the mitotic spindle (left), the structure that separates chromosomes during cell division and plays a role in human diseases, including cancer.

In Science, Young-Sam Lee and Erin K. O'Shea of Harvard take a closer look at inositol pyrophosphates, signaling molecules involved in a number of cellular processes, from gene expression to stress responses.

An experiment to test just how loud is loud during lunch hour at Smith Leadership Academy in Dorchester surprised even Sharon G. Kujawa, the director of audiology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Children who eat lots of grapes, oranges, and tomatoes are less likely to have hay fever, researchers found, suggesting that a Mediterranean diet may have health benefits for youngsters as well as adults.

A little exercise, even just a long walk, may go a long way toward helping women feel better while going through menopause, according a Penn State University study.

High-deductible health insurance plans favored by many employers often wind up being an unfair burden to women, a Harvard Medical School study says, largely because women need many routine medical exams that quickly add up.

If fairly conservative climate projections hold true for Boston, global warming will raise sea levels enough by the end of the century that Boston Harbor will flood parts of East Boston and the downtown Financial District during a typical winter northeaster. South Boston, Back Bay, and Cambridge would also probably flood during a category 2 hurricane, according to simulations produced for the Globe by a computer modeling consultant. Yet, the region has no plan to deal with flooding of that magnitude.

The latest United Nations assessment of the role of humans in global warming has found with "high confidence" that greenhouse gas emissions are at least partly responsible for a host of changes already underway, including longer growing seasons and shrinking glaciers.

Hundreds of reunions have taken place in El Salvador over the past decade, aided by advances in DNA matching through a Physicians for Human Rights forensics program, and an intensifying campaign to bring closure to victimized families, if not justice to those who violated them long ago.

Computer-aided detection systems not only failed to detect more breast cancer in women who had screening mammograms, researchers report in tomorrow's New England Journal of Medicine, but it also may have harmed them by generating a higher number of false-positive readings, resulting in significantly more call-backs for repeat mammograms and biopsies.

Dr. Joshua J. Fenton of the University of California, Davis, and his co-authors studied CAD in 429,345 mammograms, the largest trial to date since it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1998. They found that about 157 women would be called back for another mammogram and 15 women would undergo biopsies in order to detect one additional case of cancer, possibly a ductal carcinoma in situ, which is noninvasive and highly treatable.

Fenton's results "constitute a substantial hit to this technology," Dr. Ferris M. Hall of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center writes in an editorial in the same issue. Early studies had said CAD helped detect 10 to 15 percent more cases of breast cancers.

Stem cell researchers should consider whether a woman has been pregnant when they interpret results of stem cell transplantation trials, Dr. Diana Bianchi writes in a commentary in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Bianchi, who is chair of research in the department of pediatrics at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts-New England Medical Center, showed in 1996 that fetal cells persist in the blood of women who have been pregnant. In 2004 she reported that these cells appear to act like stem cells, traveling to injured organs in the mother and repairing them.

Fetal cells are "betwixt and between" adult and embryonic cells, she said in an interview. Embryonic stem cells are prized for their ability to become any kind of cell in the body. Adult stem cells are less capable of this kind of differentiation.

"It's not all adult versus embryonic stem cells," she said. "Fetal cells may have qualties that are intermediate between embryonic and adult cells. We are still testing the hypothesis that they have capabilities that may be closer to embryonic stem cells than adult stem cells."

By Scott Allen, Globe Staff

Officials at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute today announced the second largest gift in the hospital's history: $30 million from a philanthropy dedicated to the memory of the longtime owners of the Boston Red Sox, Tom and Jean Yawkey.

The gift from the Yawkey Foundation will help pay for the first new patient care building in more than 30 years at Dana-Farber, the Yawkey Center for Cancer Care, which is scheduled to open in 2011.

A 2002 study that led millions of women to throw out their hormone pills may have overestimated the dangers of that medication to women in their 50s, new research suggests. Study co-author Dr. JoAnn E. Manson will chat live with Globe readers about the report at noon at boston.com.

Paul Zani, chief executive officer of Pembroke Hospital, has resigned, and the hospital has agreed to cap its admissions amid several state investigations into the private psychiatric facility.

A strain of flu has shown hints of resistance to two flu drugs among patients in a small study in Japan, a country known for prescribing the drugs more frequently than anywhere else in the world.

The Nevada firm that imported tainted wheat gluten that triggered a massive, nationwide recall of pet food said it shipped the product only to pet food manufacturers.

Merck & Co.'s arthritis drug Arcoxia, the planned successor to its withdrawn Vioxx painkiller, probably won't win US clearance because studies suggest the product raises the risks of heart attacks.

By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff

People are enrolling faster than expected in health insurance plans under a new state law that eventually will require most Massachusetts residents to have coverage.

Nearly 63,000 people who earn less than 300 percent of the federal poverty level -- about $30,000 annually for an individual -- had signed up for state subsidized plans as of April 1, said officials overseeing implementation of the law. State officials had projected that it would take until July 1 to enroll 70,000 residents, out of the estimated 140,000 eligible for subsidized coverage.

Thousands of other residents who earn more than 300 percent of the poverty level will be required to enroll in non-subsidized programs this year. For individuals earning less than $10,210 per year, there are no monthly premiums. For those earning above that and up to $30,630, the average premium is $45 per month.

Information is available by calling 1-877-623-6765, weekdays between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., or online at the Commonwealth Care website.

By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff

Harvard University's governing body has approved a new Department of Developmental and Regenerative Biology, the first academic department in the university’s 371-year history to be based in more than one of the university’s schools.

The new department will bring together 13 to 16 researchers from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Medical School. It will be co-chaired by biologist Doug Melton, the Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences, and David Scadden, Gerald and Darlene Jordan Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Melton and Scadden are also the co-directors of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, which was founded in 2004.

The decision by the Harvard Corporation is a response to a critical university report that called for better coordination of interdisciplinary research.

The Harvard School of Public Health is urging the Motion Picture Association of America to eliminate the depiction of tobacco smoking from films seen by children and youths.

HSPH dean Barry R. Bloom, Dr. Jonathan M. Samet of Johns Hopkins, and HSPH associate dean Jay A. Winsten delivered a scientific briefing in February.

"We know movies are only one of the determinants of smoking in youths, and I don’t want to hang the whole problem on the motion picture industry. But we know you can make a real difference," Bloom told the MPAA. "The glamorization of smoking in films, even when the bad guys smoke, has impact. And even normalization of smoking in films has impact."

Zoila Torres Feldman, an ardent advocate for expanding access to high-quality health care, is leaving as chief executive officer of Great Brook Valley Health Center in Worcester after 26 years.

Zoila Torres Feldman

Feldman, 62, said her Oct. 1 departure is "absolutely not" a retirement. She has accepted no specific position but said she is passionate about addressing the ethnic and racial disparities that persist in health care.

"There are too many challenges in health care I’d like to participate in," she said in an interview. "I’d like to do some new things."

Dr. Terence R. Flotte, a pediatrician and gene therapy researcher from the University of Florida, has been named the new dean and deputy executive chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Dr. Terence R. Flotte

Currently the chair of pediatrics at the University of Florida School of Medicine in Gainesville, Flotte, 45, will succeed Dr. Aaron Lazare, 71, on May 15. Last year Lazare stepped back from the dual role of dean and chancellor of UMass Medical School, remaining chancellor until last month, when for health reasons he began a one-year sabbatical. He will then return to teaching psychology.

Flotte focuses his research on genetic therapies and cystic fibrosis in particular. He plans to continue to conduct research, see patients and teach.

Just as precious to Dr. Atul Gawande as his loupes — magnifying glasses he wears during surgery — is his iPod, which he carries with him into the operating room at Brigham and Women's Hospital and plugs into a little speaker there, a story in today's New York Times begins.

His second book, "Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance" (Metropolitan Books), comes out this week. Like his first, "Complications," the story says, it consists mostly of essays he has published in The New Yorker — pieces whose common theme is both the complexity and the imperfection of modern medicine and the need for doctors to strive to do better.

In a defeat for the Bush administration, the US Supreme Court ruled yesterday that greenhouse gases are pollutants and ordered federal environmental officials to reconsider their refusal to limit emissions from new cars and trucks.

About 1 in 4 people who appear to be depressed are in fact struggling with the normal mental fallout from a recent emotional blow, like a ruptured marriage, the loss of a job, or the collapse of an investment, a new study led by Jerome C. Wakefield of New York University suggests. To avoid unnecessary diagnoses and stigma, the standard definition of depression should be redrawn to specifically exclude such cases, the authors argue.

The the American College of Physicians is challenging the widely accepted recommendation that women should routinely undergo mammograms in their 40s, saying the risks of the breast exams may outweigh the benefit for many.

Tainted wheat gluten that triggered a massive nationwide pet food recall also ended up in processing plants that prepare food consumed by people, the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday.

Two subsidiaries of Pfizer Inc. have agreed to pay fines totaling $34.7 million for offering a kickback to recommend company drugs and for illegally promoting the human growth hormone product Genotropin for nonapproved uses, federal prosecutors said yesterday.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

A proposal to spend $36.5 million to prepare the state for a long-feared global epidemic of influenza is back before Massachusetts lawmakers, three months after they failed to act on the measure.

The money would be used in large part to buy breathing machines, hospital beds, and caches of flu medication. The legislation, sponsored by Senator Richard T. Moore, resembles a pandemic plan originally championed in February 2006 by then-Governor Mitt Romney.

Moore, an Uxbridge Democrat who is chairman of the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing, also calls in his legislation for spending money to improve the state laboratory, enhance disease tracking systems, and strengthen the ability of local health departments to deal with major health emergencies.

A hearing on the proposal is expected this week.

Quickly closing schools, theaters and churches reduced deaths early in the deadly 1918 flu pandemic, researchers report in today's online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Measures taken by different American cities were compared to see whether they were associated with reduced transmission of the flu virus, which is spread by coughing or sneezing. The first US cases of flu were reported in Philadelphia on Sept. 17, 1918, but city officials still allowed a a parade on Sept. 28 and public gatherings were not banned until Oct. 3, when cases were overwhelming the health system.

In St. Louis, public health authorities closed schools, theaters and churches two days after their first cases on Oct. 5, and that city experienced a smaller epidemic, with half the number of deaths at its peak.

"Looking back at the comparison between cities in 1918, there were enormous variations in the severity of the pandemic in different cities and those variations seem to be closely tied to the aggressiveness and promptness with which different cities put in place a set of interventions to try to block transmission," co-author Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, said in an interview.

Once those interventions were relaxed, the death rates among different cites became the same. Temporary measures were still valuable, Lipsitch said, because they reduced the stress on society and on the healthcare system by buying time at the peak of the epidemic.

"This gives support to the notion, which is now federal policy, that when facing the next pandemic communities should try as early as possible to implement a set of measures similar to this if the pandemic is severe," Lipsitch said.

Sixty families in Massachusetts were among 750 who tested a pilot version of the Interactive Autism Network, a website designed to accelerate research by connecting families with scientists who study the disorder. The site goes live today.

Julie Riley of Whitman, whose 7-year-old son is autistic, was among the testers during the pilot phase. She urged other parents to join the new network, both to learn from one another's experiences and to find answers for a future in which trial and error aren't the only way to discover what works.

"The more parents we get to participate, the more results we can get," she said in an interview. "I think it's a way to get closer to a cure."

Random urine tests for drug use have a high error rate even when performed in adolescent substance abuse programs, researchers from Children's Hospital Boston report in the April issue of Pediatrics.

Dr. Sharon Levy and her colleagues at the hospital's Center for Adolescent Substance Abuse Research took 710 random urine tests from 110 patients who were 13 to 21 years old and enrolled in a drug program. Comparing the results with those obtained from confirmed laboratory tests, they found that 12 percent of the random tests had results that could be misinterpreted.

Some of the samples were too diluted to interpret reliably. Of the samples confirmed to show Oxycontin use, two-thirds had tested negative at first.

A team led by Harvard researchers has found dramatic genetic links to prostate cancer that appear to underlie many of the cases and help explain the higher occurrence of the disease among African-American men.

Boston's hospitals are going green: The city's next wave of medical buildings will feature earth-friendly construction materials. Sunlight will bathe patient rooms, and some roofs will sprout grass or "healing gardens" that use recycled water and provide insulation.

People who hoard bear the weight of their mess plus a mental disorder only now being understood. Treatment programs are just beginning.

In choosing a doctor, people surveyed for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts said the most important information is the doctor's experience treating a specific medical condition, the average amount of time the doctor spends with each patient, and patient satisfaction ratings.

His career, her health. Not an easy balancing act, Judy Foreman writes about John and Elizabeth Edwards -- and her own 11 years grappling with that dilemma while her husband Tom had lymphoma and prostate cancer.

Also in Health/Science, meet environmental epidemiologist Phillippe Grandjean, who studies the relationship between chemicals and children's diseases.

In Business, Boston Scientific Corp. plans to spend up to $40 million on a campaign to educate patients who receive the company's heart stents about the importance of sticking with the blood-thinning drugs they are prescribed after surgery.

In Living/Arts, a new book by Harriet A. Washington called "Medical Apartheid" puts clinical testing of minorities on trial.

The flu spawned significantly fewer fevers and coughs than usual this winter in Massachusetts and much of the nation, the second straight year that the season of misery passed without widespread suffering.

"It's a very, very slow this season," said Dr. Alfred DeMaria, the director of communicable disease control in Massachusetts, said in Saturday's Globe.