Today's Globe: mercury leaks, healthcare bills, Jarvik ads, Edward A. Mason

Compact fluorescent lamps - those spiral, energy-efficient bulbs popular as a device to combat global warming - can pose a small risk of mercury poisoning to infants, young children, and pregnant women if they break, two reports concluded yesterday.

By 2017, consumers and taxpayers will spend more than $4 trillion on healthcare, accounting for $1 of every $5 spent, the federal government projects.

When "diet and exercise isn't enough," Pfizer still wants consumers to ask their doctor about Lipitor - just not Dr. Robert Jarvik (left). Yesterday, Pfizer dropped the doctor and inventor of the artificial heart as pitchman for the world's best-selling medication, after his credentials - in medicine and in his own exercise regimen - came under fire.

In documentary films he produced covering complicated, often moving themes, Dr. Edward Allen Mason (left) wanted students of psychiatry to understand facets of the field that could not be gleaned from textbooks. While many previous films in the genre used actors as patients, the Harvard Medical School professor made films that featured real patients struggling with numerous problems. Dr. Mason, who later helped to create a cooperative residential complex, Cambridge Co-Housing, where he lived his final 10 years, died Dec. 26 at Mount Auburn Hospital from pneumonia following a stroke. He was 88.