Today's Globe: surgeon general, swine flu vaccine, heart healing, cancer drug questions, Louis Mutschler, small-business squeeze

President Obama served notice yesterday that his administration will forge ahead with a plan to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system despite what he described as mounting criticism, and he introduced his nominee for surgeon general as someone who “understands the urgency’’ of healthcare reform. In a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden he presented Regina Benjamin, a family physician from rural Alabama, as his choice to become the top US public health official.

A fully licensed swine flu vaccine might not be available until the end of the year, a top official at the World Health Organization said yesterday, in a report that could affect many countries’ vaccination plans.

British doctors designed a radical solution to save a girl with major heart problems in 1995: they implanted a donor heart directly onto her own failing heart. After 10 years with two blood pumping organs, Hannah Clark’s faulty one did what many experts had thought impossible: it healed itself enough so that doctors could remove the donated heart.

Food and Drug Administration scientists are questioning whether study results are reliable enough to warrant approval for a new ovarian cancer drug from Johnson & Johnson.

Psychiatrist Louis H. Mutschler spent more than 25 years working at Emerson Hospital in Concord, where his wry wit and devotion to healing won him respect from many colleagues. Director of the hospital’s psychiatric services department for 15 years until retiring in 2000, he died of prostate cancer at his home in Lincoln July 6. He was 69.

"In our current economic crisis, rising healthcare costs have fallen particularly hard on small businesses and their employees," State Senator Richard T. Moore and state Representative Harriett L. Stanley, co-chairs of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Health Care Financing, write on the opinion page. "[Our] proposal forces providers and insurers to share responsibility for holding down healthcare costs."