By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The National Institutes of Health will present a live webcast tomorrow of a blue ribbon panel's ongoing review of a controversial laboratory being built by Boston University.

The meeting, which will be at the NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Md., will be aired on-line starting at 8 a.m. at videocast.nih.gov.

The session is scheduled to focus on how BU and NIH can forge partnerships with the community surrounding the South End project. The executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, Barbara Ferrer, is scheduled to speak as well as Klare Allen, the activist who has led opposition to the lab for five years.

The blue-ribbon panel was convened by NIH after the National Research Council, an independent board of scientists, issued a report in November that was sharply critical of the federal government's earlier safety reviews of the BU project.

The lab, largely underwritten by NIH, is designed to allow researchers to work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and Marburg. More than 80 percent complete, the project is on Albany Street amid the university's medical school campus.

Researchers from Boston University are trying to solve the age-old mystery of why some people live an extremely long life and why their relatives tend to do so, too.

Together with colleagues from Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Thomas Perls of BU is looking for two or more healthy brothers and sisters whose families have a history of long life. To participate in the Long Life Family Study, volunteers must live within a three-hour drive of Boston, New York, or Pittsburgh and be willing to be interviewed and give a blood sample for genetic analysis.

Participants will be asked about their family and health history, have a physical exam, and undergo some screening tests, according to study sponsor, the National Institute on Aging. People interested in joining the study, now in its second phase of recruitment, can call 877-362-2074.

Boston Medical Center has named its first high-level safety and quality officer.

Dr. William M. Barron (left) has been named vice president for quality and patient safety/chief quality officer for the hospital. The new position consolidates in one senior management position the safety responsibilities previously handled by the chief medical officer.

Barron, who was also appointed director of the Center of Clinical Quality Improvement at Boston University School of Medicine, comes to Boston from Loyola University Health System, where he was vice president of quality and patient safety and a professor in the departments of medicine and obstetrics and gynecology at Loyola University.

Physicians and medical students are voicing their support for a state ban on gifts to doctors from drug and medical device makers.

Four leading physicians – Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine; Dr. David Coleman, Boston Medical Center chief of medicine; Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, Tufts University School of Medicine professor; and Dr. Stephen E. Tosi, UMass Memorial Health Care chief medical officer – wrote a letter urging passage of a bill approved by the state Senate and awaiting action in the House.

“Many other professions adhere to strict ethics codes that bar receipt of gifts, while elected and government officials are guided by public finance laws prohibiting gifts from lobbyists,” the doctors wrote. “We do not believe physicians should be treated differently.”

The National Physicians Alliance and the Boston University and Tufts University chapters of the American Medical Students Association also sent a letter to Governor Deval Patrick, Senate President Therese Murray, and House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi pushing passage of the bill.

“To do right by our patients, our prescribing decisions must be based on independent, scientific evidence, free of inappropriate influences,” their letter said. “It is time to remove conflicts of interest from the doctor-patient relationship.”

Roger Clemens grabbed headlines and hurt his Hall of Fame chances when the Mitchell Report accused him of using human growth hormone to pump up his pitching. But a bigger story may be the rising demand for the hormone on web sites, in clinics and at compounding pharmacies that promise to bulk up bodies, boost athletic performance, and turn back the clock of aging.

Dr. Thomas T. Perls of the Boston University School of Medicine, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, points out that systematic reviews of clinical trials have found no evidence that taking human growth hormone supplements helps anybody but people with a specific deficiency of the hormone. It’s hard to track the illegal use of the hormone, but Perls cites one source that says it’s a $2 billion-a-year industry in the United States.

Human growth hormone can hurt people who don’t need it by causing swelling, pain, breast development in males, and insulin resistance that can lead to diabetes, Perls and his co-author, S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago, write. They call for better public education, better regulation, and better enforcement of existing policies.

“Until and unless efficacy and safety of [human growth hormone] is demonstrated by unbiased scientifically rigorous clinical trials for purposes advocated by the anti-aging industry, [human growth hormone] should not be distributed or prescribed for any purpose other than its narrowly defined clinical and legal indications,” they write.

Perls has more information at his web site.

By Christopher Baxter, Globe Correspondent

An elite panel of scientists recommended today that federal health authorities conduct the most extensive safety review so far of the controversial laboratory being built by Boston University.

The most dangerous germs require further study, the blue-ribbon panel told the director of the National Institutes of Health. Those assessments should compare outbreak situations in urban, suburban and rural environments, according to the group’s report (The full report will be available to the public next week).

The panel also recommended the studies consider a number of emergency situations — rather than one “worst case” scenario — including accidents and attacks, the report said. Those risk assessments should include the likelihood of a germ being released, the risk posed to the public and the resources available to deal with an outbreak, the report said.

Medical students turned the tables on medical schools, grading them on their conflict-of-interest policies -- and they didn’t spare the red ink.

In a report released today by the American Medical Student Association, Harvard Medical School got an F for not having a standard policy to guard against industry influence in the form of gifts, free samples, speakers fees, or other payments to doctors, residents, and students. Harvard spokesman David Cameron confirmed what the student group's report noted: The independently governed hospitals affiliated with Harvard have their own policies and the university is conducting a university-wide review of all of its conflict-of-interest policies.

Tufts University School of Medicine earned an I for Incomplete. Its standards are still a work in progress.

Even Boston University School of Medicine and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, highly regarded around the country for their strict policies forbidding freebies, mustered only a B on the list. Despite praise for its strong policies, BU could do better by adding the subject to its curriculum, the students said. UMass won kudos for its clear language but lacked a policy on disclosure as well as attention to the conflict-of-interest question in its courses.

Seven out of 150 medical school earned As and 60 flunked.

By Kay Lazar, Globe Staff

Boston's three leading medical schools are among 14 nationwide that will receive federal grants aimed at helping scientists more quickly turn their discoveries into treatments for patients.

Under the program, Harvard Medical School has been awarded $117.7 million over the next five years, while Boston University Medical School will receive $23 million and Tufts University School of Medicine $20 million over that time period, the National Institutes of Health announced today.

The awards reflect a sea change in federal funding for scientific research. Schools that have traditionally competed within their own institutions for federal dollars must now form one collaborative center at each medical school to pull together all of its researchers and departments.

The mission of the grant program, called the Clinical and Translational Science Award, is to create a network of medical research institutions across the country that will translate new knowledge into tangible benefits for patients. Launched in 2006, the initiative has awarded money to 24 other medical schools. Total funding for the 14 new recipients will be $533 million over the next five years, the NIH said.

"Everybody knows there is a lot of great research going on but it doesn’t get to public practice," said Dr. Harry Selker, director of Tufts' new Clinical and Translational Science Institute. "This (grant program) is a big deal for the nation."

Ten scientists from Massachusetts were named Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators today, five from MIT alone and one from Boston University, marking a first for that institution.

Harvard has three and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and University of Massachusetts Medical School each have one new investigator. Fifty-six scientists from 31 research centers will be supported by $600 million over five years from the biomedical philanthropy as they continue to lead laboratories at their home institutions. The new appointments bring to 19 the number of HHMI investigators at MIT, the highest concentration at one location in the country, the institute said.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

Federal health officials should conduct a rigorous review of potential threats posed by a controversial Boston University laboratory and make sure the surrounding neighborhood is kept fully informed, an elite panel of scientists said today.

The chairman of the panel, Dr. Adel Mahmoud of Princeton University, exhorted the National Institutes of Health to operate transparently, saying "this is essential for credibility and public trust."

Another member of the committee, Vicki S. Freimuth of the University of Georgia, said it was clear from the five-year history of the project that "problems with trust" had clouded the relationship between the community and the leading forces behind the project, BU and the federal government.

Mahmoud and 10 other members of a blue-ribbon panel commissioned by the NIH traveled to Boston to conduct their third meeting regarding the high-security lab BU is building on its medical school campus. The director of the NIH formed the advisory board after his agency's earlier safety review of the project came under intense criticism.

In addition to releasing their preliminary findings, the scientists ventured to the State House on a community fact-finding mission, hearing from more than three dozen speakers who overwhelmingly opposed the lab, which is designed to allow work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and Marburg.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The National Institutes of Health will present a live webcast tomorrow of a blue ribbon panel's Boston meeting reviewing a controversial laboratory being built by Boston University.
The meeting is scheduled to begin at the State House at 9 a.m., and will be available for viewing . The hearing, in Gardner Auditorium, is open to the public.

Members of the public will be able to address the scientists, an independent board of specialists enlisted by NIH after the The blue-ribbon panel of specialists was convened by NIH after the National Research Council, an independent board of scientists, issued a report in November that was sharply critical of the federal government's earlier safety reviews of the BU project.

The lab, largely underwritten by NIH, is designed to allow researchers to work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and Marburg. More than 80 percent complete, the project is on Albany Street in the South End.

After years of intermittent talks, two Rhode Island hospitals have taken a step closer to merging.

St. Joseph Health Services of Rhode Island and Roger Williams Medical Center said yesterday they had signed a memorandum of understanding to form an affiliation, the Providence Journal reports today.

St. Joseph Health Services runs Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, a community hospital in North Providence, and St. Joseph Hospital for Specialty Care, which offers rehabilitation, psychiatric care, and primary care in Providence. The hospital typically has about 175 inpatients at Fatima and 70 in Providence, the story said. Roger Williams Medical Center, in Providence, is a teaching hospital affiliated with the Boston University School of Medicine. It an have as many as 170 patients.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

A blue-ribbon panel investigating the safety of a controversial research laboratory being built by Boston University will hold a public meeting next week on Beacon Hill.

The panel, commissioned by the director of the National Institutes of Health, will meet from 9 a.m. till noon May 16 in Gardner Auditorium at the State House. Members of the public will be able to address the scientists. A spokesman for the NIH, which is underwriting much of the cost of the South End lab, said members of the public do not have to register in advance of the meeting and are asked to limit their comments to three minutes. Citizens may also submit written comments.

The blue-ribbon panel was convened after the National Research Council, an independent board of scientists, issued a report in November sharply critical of NIH's earlier safety reviews of the BU project.

Teenagers who lived in towns that banned smoking in restaurants were 40 percent less likely to become established smokers than their peers in towns with weaker restaurant smoking laws, Boston researchers report.

Writing in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, Dr. Michael Siegel of the Boston University School of Public Health presents final results from three waves of telephone surveys in 301 Massachusetts towns that began in 2001. More than 3,800 young people who were 12 to 17 years old at the beginning of the study were asked if they had ever smoked, if they had a cigarette in the past month, and if they had smoked more than 100 cigarettes.

In an earlier paper Siegel and his colleagues found that young people in towns with smoke-free restaurant laws perceived a lower level of smoking and a lower social acceptability of smoking than their peers in towns with weaker smoking laws, where smoking was restricted to designated areas in restaurants or not at all.

The current paper suggests that the anti-smoking laws may work by blocking the transition from experimenting with cigarettes to becoming established smokers. Massachusetts banned smoking in all workplaces, bars, and restaurants in 2004.

"The public health implications of this are that restaurant smoking bans are actually one of the most effective interventions to reduce youth smoking. While these policies are intended to protect workers and the public from secondhand smoke exposure, it turns out that an additional benefit of these laws is to reduce rates of youth smoking, thus making them a particularly powerful public health intervention," Siegel said in an interview. "There are not a lot of interventions out there which can produce a 40 percent reduction in youth smoking."

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

An elite panel of scientists this morning urged the federal government to substantially expand its safety review of a controversial research laboratory being built by Boston University.

The recommendation comes from the National Research Council, an independent advisory board of scientists, which sharply criticized the federal government in November for its safety assessment of the BU project, branding the review "not sound and credible."

Leaders of the National Institutes of Health did not have an immediate reaction to the recommendations. But if the NIH embraces the advice, the opening of the BU lab could be significantly delayed. Already, the university had abandoned long-stated plans to open the South End facility by this fall, and a BU spokeswoman this morning said it was premature to speculate about a revised opening date.

Massachusetts’ four medical schools are reviewing a new policy issued by their national organization that urges a ban on gifts from drug or medical device makers.

After two years of discussions, the Association of American Medical Colleges yesterday issued a recommendation that free meals, gifts, travel, and ghost-writing services have no place in medical education. The conflict-of-interest policy would apply to doctors, students, and staff members at the country’s 129 medical schools.

University of Massachusetts Medical School faculty are already bound by rules set by its clinical partner, UMass Memorial Medical Center, which have made industry-funded meals, gifts, and speakers' bureaus off-limits. Thoru Pederson, associate vice provost for research at the state's medical school, said the AAMC policy fits with what the school has been considering.

“I think this thing really has teeth,” he said in an interview. “We feel if a company buys you dinner, you’re on their payroll, even though you claim your independence as a scholar.”

Boston University School of Medicine also has a strict policy. Its doctors have been barred since September from receiving gifts or free meals on campus.

“We have given thought to all the provisions in the AAMC recommendations,” BU spokeswoman Ellen Berlin said yesterday in an e-mail interview. “We have set standards for participation in speaker's bureaus but did not prohibit them.”

Harvard Medical School’s executive council will consider the association’s policy, spokeswoman Alyssa Kneller said. The school has guidelines in place that forbid ghost-writing, in which drug or device company writers create articles for scientific journals but attach the name of an academic researcher before submitting the work for publication.

Tufts University School of Medicine’s faculty senate is in the process of developing a policy on the relationship between industry and the medical school and will look at the medical school group’s recommendations, spokeswoman Christine Fennelly said.

A Boston researcher whose article in a major scientific journal advised using tanning beds to treat vitamin D deficiency received money from a foundation run and financed by the tanning-bed industry, according to a story in today's Wall Street Journal. This follows the disclosure two weeks ago that lung-cancer screening research published in two prominent journals was funded by a cigarette manufacturer through a foundation.

Dr. Michael Holick of Boston University disclosed partial funding from the UV Foundation in the article published last year by the New England Journal of Medicine, but the note did not provide further information. The foundation receives money from the Indoor Tanning Association and makers of tanning-bed equipment, the Wall Street Journal said. BU has received $162,014 from the foundation, making it the top recipient.

Women who ate foods that matched a well-known diet for reducing high blood pressure had a lower risk of heart disease and stroke than women whose diets didn't come as close, a new study reports.

The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, better known as the DASH diet, promotes eating foods low in cholesterol and sodium by emphasizing fruits and vegetables and minimizing red meat and fat. Following the diet pushes blood pressure down both for people who have hypertension and for people with normal blood pressure, research has shown. It also cuts cholesterol, according to other research.

But no studies had gone one step beyond those risk factors to see whether the diet made a difference in the incidence of heart disease and stroke in healthy people, according to Teresa T. Fung of Simmons College and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Tufts University is establishing a master's degree program in nutrition science and policy in Ras al Khaimah, one of the United Arab Emirates, joining a growing Boston medical education presence in the Middle East.

The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy will offer the graduate degrees through one year of online instruction combined with a 10- to 14-day residency period in Ras al Khaimah. The curriculum will focus on nutrition and public health challenges in the Gulf region, the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, Tufts said in a statement today announcing the program.

Last month Boston University opened centers devoted to dental research, education, and care in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Harvard University's international subsidiary Harvard Medical International, recently spun off to the hospital group Partners HealthCare, has built a large complex in Dubai.

Photo by David Ryan, Globe Staff
Tufts Medical School students Jessica Hsu (center) is thrilled about going to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She hugs Maristella Evanglista, with Kate Esselen on the right.

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Fourth-year medical students discovered today where they will spend the next stage of their medical training.

This year the Match Day formula sorted more than 15,000 US medical school seniors into programs at teaching hospitals. There was a small uptick in family medicine choices nationwide, coming at a time when primary care doctors are in short supply.

At the four medical schools in Massachusetts, primary care specialties -- family medicine, internal medicine, obstetrics/gynecology, and pediatrics -- drew almost half the soon-to-be MDs graduating from the three schools in Boston. At University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, the tally was higher, consistent with its mission focusing on primary care. Both levels are similar to previous years.

-- Boston University School of Medicine: 46 percent
-- Harvard Medical School: 44 percent
-- Tufts University School of Medicine: 46 percent
-- University of Massachusetts Medical School: 60 percent

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, offered the clearest sign yet that a controversial laboratory being built by Boston University won't open anytime soon.

Addressing a blue ribbon panel of scientists convened to review the project, Zerhouni said he had no expectation that the board would "rubber stamp" his agency's earlier conclusion that the lab would present no threat to the surrounding South End neighborhood. The centerpiece of the project is a Biosafety Level-4 lab where scientists can work on the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and anthrax.

"We are not here because we want you to rubber stamp what we have done," Zerhouni said. "We need to do this right, even if it takes a long time."

Harvard is expanding its no-smoking policy to its entire Longwood medical campus, extending current rules banning smoking inside buildings and near entrances and air intakes.

The new rules will go into effect next spring for Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and the Harvard School of Public Health. The delay will give smokers time to quit and an opportunity to enter free, voluntary stop-smoking programs, medical school dean Dr. Jeffrey Flier said in a statement announcing the change.

The announcement was made yesterday at the opening of an exhibit on advertising campaigns that portrayed doctors pushing cigarettes.

The National Institutes of Health has created a "blue ribbon panel," including experts on infectious diseases, public health, biodefense and environmental justice, to advise the agency during ongoing reviews of public safety and environmental issues posed by a Boston University laboratory designed to study the world's deadliest germs.

In November, another panel of scientists, the National Research Council, concluded that the NIH had failed to adequately address the potential risks to the South End and Roxbury neighbors of the Biosafety Level-4 lab if germs escaped from the facility on the Boston Medical Center campus.

The panel will hold its first public meeting next Thursday, March 13, in Wilson Hall on the third floor of Building 1 of the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. The meeting time has not yet been set.

Boston University has opened centers devoted to dental research, education, and care in Dubai.

The Boston University Institute of Dental Research and Education Dubai and the Boston University Dental Health Center at Dubai Healthcare City will focus on research and training of graduate dentists in specialties. Healthcare City is a medical zone in the emirate on the eastern Arabian peninsula.

Faculty from the Boston University Goldman School of Dental Medicine will develop the training programs, BU said. The first residents will enroll in July.

Academic medical centers are increasingly adopting policies designed to clamp down on potential conflicts of interest posed by industry payments to individual doctors or researchers. But they have been slower to put in place rules governing payments to the institutions themselves, including the four medical schools in Massachusetts, according to a survey to be published tomorrow in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

A team led by Eric G. Campbell of Massachusetts General Hospital found that only 38 percent of the medical schools responding to a 2006 questionnaire had an institutional conflict-of-interest policy and 37 percent said they were on their way to putting one in place.

Eighty-six of the 125 US medical schools answered questions about what rules they had for financial interests of the schools that might affect the conduct of research. That could include royalties from licensing agreements or equity holdings in drug companies or other businesses.

At three of Massachusetts's four medical schools, institutional policies are works in progress. At the fourth, issues are considered case by case.

To live until you’re 90, make sure to exercise and not smoke.

To make it to 100, it helps if you don't develop diseases linked to aging until after 85 – and to cope with them well if you do get them.

A pair of papers by two Boston research groups appearing in tomorrow’s Archives of Internal Medicine report on what factors -- other than good genes -- allow the oldest of old people to survive. A group from Harvard Medical School found that men who lived until 90 enhanced not only their lifespan but also improved their mental and physical function if they led a healthy lifestyle in “early old age.” Researchers at Boston University’s New England Centenarian Study said the timing of illness was important in reaching 100, but coping with illness well enough to stay independent was also key to reaching 100.

A state group fostering technological innovation has awarded grants to fund nine research projects, including one proposed by the late cancer investigator Dr. Judah Folkman.

The Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center has given a total of $360,000 for proposals to demonstrate a new technology's commercial viability. In addition to the Folkman grant for work to be done at Children's Hospital Boston, three awards went to Northeastern University, two to the University of Massachusetts, and one each to Boston University, Harvard University, and Massachusetts General Hospital.

By Stephen Smith, Globe staff

Even as he forges ahead with his battle to prevent CVS Corp. from opening in-store clinics, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino today quietly convened a summit of high-powered medical players to examine what ails primary care in the city.

The meeting at the city's Parkman House included a who's who from Boston's healthcare landscape, including the presidents of three of the city's biggest hospitals: Elaine Ullian from Boston Medical Center, Dr. Gary Gottlieb from Brigham and Women's, and Ellen Zane from Tufts-New England Medical Center. Leaders of community health centers were there, too, along with the in-coming president of the Massachusetts Medical Society and the dean of Boston University's medical school, Dr. Karen Antman.

"We came together not just to talk about a problem that we all know has existed for some time," Menino said in a written statement after the meeting, "we came together in the spirit of creating a thoughtful and coordinated action plan to reduce barriers that limit access to important medical services."

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The opening of a Boston University laboratory designed to study the world's deadliest germs will be delayed several months, or longer, according to documents filed this week in federal court.

BU administrators overseeing the Biosafety Level-4 lab, the centerpiece of a larger federally sponsored project, had predicted that the facility would be operating by this fall. But the National Institutes of Health said in this week's court filing that it now anticipates that an ongoing environmental review of the lab will take longer than expected and won't be completed until "on or before April 30, 2009."

A BU spokeswoman, Ellen Berlin, said today that "the NIH is doing additional studies and that clearly adds time to the schedule. As the NIH process is ongoing, it is premature to set a precise opening date."

Still, the disclosure by the federal agency of its extended timetable for finishing the environmental analysis constitutes a clear setback for BU, which first began pursuing federal grants to build the lab on its South End medical campus five years ago.

Health Care For All's Consumer Health Quality Council -- about 40 "real, ordinary consumers," as HCFA leader John McDonough says -- was created to put a human face on harm caused by medical errors.

Now you can see for yourself, on YouTube.

In three videos from the council’s story bank, members tell how systemic, preventible healthcare problems harmed them or their loved ones. Made with the help of Boston University School of Public Health students Madhavi Bezwada, Meredith Mueller, and Hsiang-Yin Yeh, they were also shown this morning at a Statehouse information session.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The state's highest court today delivered a victory to opponents of a controversial research laboratory being built by Boston University, ordering that an ongoing environmental review should continue. The Supreme Judicial Court also agreed with a 2006 ruling from a superior court judge that the state's original environmental analysis was "arbitrary and capricious."

The decision by the SJC, though, does not halt construction of the laboratory complex in Boston's South End, which is about 70 percent complete. The centerpiece of the project is a Biosafety Level-4 lab where scientists will be able to work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and anthrax.

The case wound up before the SJC because BU had appealed the earlier ruling by Suffolk Superior Court Judge Ralph D. Gants.

In its decision, the top court ruled that the review by the state environmental affairs secretary during the administration of Governor Mitt Romney "lacked a rational basis."

Today's decision represents the second time in two weeks that environmental reviews of the BU project have been lambasted. An independent panel of scientists declared two weeks ago that a separate federal review of the lab was "not sound and credible" and failed to adequately address the consequences of highly lethal germs escaping from the project.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

A federal agency's safety review of a controversial laboratory being built by Boston University was "not sound and credible" and failed to sufficiently address community concerns, according to a blistering report released today by an independent panel of scientists.

The study by the prestigious National Research Council criticizes a federal government analysis that concluded that the BU lab poses no health threat to the South End neighborhood where it is being built. The federal examination failed to adequately consider the dangers of working with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola and plague, in the middle of a congested urban neighborhood, the study concluded. The new report did not examine the potential safety of the lab, only the quality of the federal government's safety analysis.

Despite the pointed rebuke, the review being presented at this hour in Washington does not have immediate consequences on construction of the nearly $200 million project, which is more than half finished. Still, the analysis could influence ongoing government reviews of the project and appears guaranteed to embolden lab opponents who have fought for more than four years to block the Albany Street lab.

The council's report was commissioned by the state after a judge ordered a further review of the lab project. The ruling by Suffolk Superior Court Judge Ralph D. Gants mandated that a more extensive environmental analysis of the lab be conducted but did not require the case to come back before him.

More than a third of men with early-stage prostate cancer received treatment that didn’t fit their pre-existing problems with urinary, bowel or sexual function, Boston researchers report in a new study. They said their finding points to poor communication between doctors and patients.

“We found that the mismatches were more common than we figured,” Dr. James A. Talcott of Massachusetts General Hospital said in an interview. “For a single strong contraindication, one-third of patients ended up getting what appeared to be the wrong treatment.”

Three generations of volunteers who helped make the Framingham Heart Study a landmark in medical research will be thanked for their participation when the nation's top health officials come to town Nov. 29.

Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Director Dr. Elizabeth G. Nabel will honor the town's 9,000 current participants for their role in improving scientists' understanding of heart disease. The study, now entering its 60th year, revealed the impact of now-familiar risk factors for heart disease: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking and obesity.

Before the Framingham celebration, Leavitt will speak at Harvard Medical School about using genetic information in personalized health care. The Framingham study recently made genetic information available to other researchers so they can investigate genetics in heart disease and other conditions.

The Framingham Heart Study is funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and conducted jointly by Boston University and NHLBI.

By Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff

A University of Massachusetts Medical School professor who said he was conducting research on infectious disease during his arrest in a Worcester prostitution sting is studying gonorrhea in human subjects, a school spokesman said today.

However, the school was not aware that the study -- "Immunology of Infection with Neisseria gonorrhea" -- involved a trip to the corner of Main and Grand streets Saturday afternoon, where Dr. Peter A. Rice was arrested after allegedly offering to pay an undercover female officer $40 for sex.

"I don't think that his arrest had any connection to his work with the university," UMass spokesman Mark Shelton said this afternoon.

Researchers exploring connections between breast cancer and environmental exposures will use state funds to study chemicals found in households and the workplace.

The University of Massachusetts at Lowell, the Silent Spring Institute -- a nonprofit that researches the links between health and the environment -- and the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition will get $250,000 earmarked by the legislature for the project.

The Silent Spring Institute will continue its work examining household dust for links to cancer, UMass-Lowell will pursue the effects of chemicals at work and at home, and the advocacy coalition will publicize findings they reach, Richard Clapp, adjunct professor in the school's School of Health and Environment, said in an interview.

“We’re trying to lay the groundwork for innovative work in Massachusetts with new lines of research,” said Clapp, who is also professor of environmental health at Boston University School of Public Health.

University of Massachusetts Medical School cancer biologist Dr. JeanMarie Houghton (left) has won a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Her research focuses on the contribution of stem cells to cancer, in particular how normal stem cells that migrate to an area of chronic infection can develop into cancer cells. The award will extend her five-year National Institutes of Health grant for two years.

Boston University biomedical engineer James J. Collins has won a four-year, $1 million grant from the Ellison Medical Foundation to study the molecular basis of aging and the causes of diseases associated with it, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Rhode Island Hospital in Providence has received a $5 million grant from the National Foundation for Trauma Care to improve its preparedness for public health emergencies.

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

A diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease does not automatically mean an end to driving, experts on aging said at an MIT conference today, but because there is no test to determine when people with dementia should no longer get behind the wheel, families need help deciding when to take away the keys.

"All people with Alzheimer's will eventually be unable to drive," said Robert Stern, co-director of Boston University's Alzheimer's Disease Clinical and Research Program. "That does not mean they can't drive early on in the disease. Everyone has a different course. It steals cognitive skills at a different pace."

A Boston group is sharing genetic information from families affected by autism with other researchers to promote understanding of the developmental disorder.

The Autism Consortium, whose members include hospitals, medical schools and universities in the Boston area, will transfer profiles of 500,000 genetic variations found across the genomes of 700 families with two or more children who have autism. The data will be held by the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange, a program of the advocacy organization Autism Speaks. Scientists can apply to the exchange, which gathered DNA from the families. The samples have been scanned for sequences where there are deletions or extra copies of DNA segments. The consortium is sharing the genetic variations it found.

"We returned all of the raw data to AGRE so they can distribute it to any other investigtors who want to begin exploring what may be the genetic underpinnings of autism," Mark Daly, a consortium member from Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said in an interview. "Understanding the genetics underlying a complex disease is not an easy problem to solve. So there's no excuse for hoarding your data when much more can be learned by sharing."

Just as weary but exhilarated Red Sox fans head into the World Series on two days' rest, the New York Times devotes its Science section to the subject of sleep.

“To do science you have to have an idea, and for years no one had one; they saw sleep as nothing but an annihilation of consciousness,” Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, told the Times. “Now we know different, and we’ve got some very good ideas about what’s going on."

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

Opponents of a high-security research laboratory being built by Boston University in the South End criticized the university today for failing to hire more city residents, minorities, and women into construction jobs at the Albany Street site.

A city rule on construction hiring requires contractors to make a good faith effort to assure that at least half of the workforce lives in the city, that a quarter represent minority groups, and that 10 percent are women.

The lab foes, led by the community group Safety Net, charged that BU had betrayed a promise to create jobs for the community. A BU spokesman acknowledged that the university had fallen short of the city benchmarks, but pledged to continue working toward meeting the goals.

The centerpiece of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories will be a Biosafety Level-4 lab, where scientists will have the ability to study the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, anthrax, and plague.

Two local researchers have received government grants to explore the organization and function of the human genome, part of an expansion of a project that already has shown the genome to be far more complex than previously thought.

Dr. Bradley Bernstein of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Zhiping Weng of Boston University are among principal investigators in the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements, or ENCODE, a project funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute. The insititute announced more than $80 million in grants today.

Bernstein has won $4.8 million over four years to study proteins important in DNA packaging in human cells. Weng will receive $1.5 million over three years to identify binding sites in regions of DNA that guide how genes are transcribed.

Three generations of Framingham Heart Study participants have shared their medical information with researchers learning about cardiovascular disease. Now the landmark study's files will be opened to scientists around the world so they can explore the links between genes and disease.

Framingham is the first study in an open-access project launched by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The data come from more than 9,300 Framingham participants who had their DNA tested for 550,000 genetic variations. Researchers will have free access to that genetic information as well as clinical and laboratory test results. Names of the study subjects have been removed.

The Framingham study, sponsored by Boston University School of Medicine, Boston University School of Public Health and the NHLBI, will continue to add information from ongoing research. NHLBI will also add data from other large studies to the new program called SHARe, short for SNP Health Association Resource. SNP stands for single nucleotide polymorphism, which is a kind of genetic variation. Researchers can find out about access to SHARe data at the NIH database of Genotypes and Phenotypes.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

Boston University today named a federal scientist who specializes in the study of the Ebola and Marburg viruses to the number two position at its controversial high-security laboratory being built in Boston's South End.

Thomas W. Geisbert will become associate director of the Biosafety Level-4 Laboratory and related facilities already rising on Albany Street. The high-security lab will allow scientists to work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, anthrax, and plague.

Geisbert comes to BU from a similar position at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where he helps preside over that agency's Biosafety Level-4 lab. When Geisbert joins BU on Oct. 1, he will also have direct responsibility for overseeing the handling and analysis of specimens generated by research projects in the facility, which is underwritten by a $128 million grant from the US government.

BU also announced today that Joan Geisbert, who is married to Thomas W. Geisbert, has been hired to help run the specimen lab. Joan Geisbert, who begins her job at BU on Feb. 1, has worked in Biosafety Level-4 labs for 26 years and most recently has supervised high-security labs at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland.

The BU lab, which is being built on the university's medical school campus, has generated lawsuits and street protests by opponents, who maintain that the facility has no place in a congested urban neighborhood. Foes of the lab have also charged that locating it in the South End imposes an unfair burden on a community with a significant segment of poor and minority residents.

Boston University bioethicist Michael Grodin says in today's Washington Post that organ donation networks can appear too zealous in their efforts to find potential donors.

"It's like they're vultures flying around the hospitals hovering over beds waiting for them to die so they can grab the organs," he told the Post. "That's the impression you get sometimes."

The story traces the more aggressive drive for organ donations to a 2003 federal campaign called the Breakthrough Collaborative. It was designed to boost the number of organs retrieved by the nation's 58 organ-procurement organizations, or OPOs, in light of a growing waiting list for kidneys, livers and other organs.

OPOs defend their practices while condemning a California case in which a surgeon is accused of hastening an organ donor's death, the story said.

"That case appears absolutely to be a case of a transplant recovery surgeon crossing a very clear line that should never be crossed," Thomas Mone, president of the Association of Organ Procurement Organization, told the Post. "Our job is to recover organs and save lives. But we have to do that sensitively, honestly and fairly, keeping the interests of the donors and families in mind. There's often a fine line there, but we make sure we never cross it."

By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff

Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center today announced a strict new conflict-of-interest policy that will place hard limits on interactions between doctors and representatives from medical device makers and pharmaceutical companies.

Robert Restuccia, executive director of the Prescription Project, a Boston-based non-profit that promotes stricter conflict-of-interest policies nationally, said the university and hospital have adopted a model policy that goes further than many other institutions.

Boston Medical Center and the medical school, for example, now ban all clinicians from accepting personal gifts from industry, and meals funded by companies -- often a staple at teaching hospitals -- are no longer allowed on campus. Also, doctors who serve on committees that pick which drugs the hospital will use, are not allowed to have any financial relationship, including consulting agreements, with companies that might benefit from those decisions.

Attached to a steerable needle, miniaturized instruments
such as this tissue-nibbling device (shown next to a
sharpened pencil) could be used in minimally invasive
heart surgery.

Researchers at Boston University and Children's Hospital Boston have won a five-year, $5 million grant to make complex heart repairs possible without open-heart surgery.

Working with California medical instrument maker Mircofabrica Inc., Pierre Dupont of BU's School of Engineering and cardiac surgeon Dr. Pedro del Nido of Children's will develop robotic instruments that can reach the heart through small incisions in the chest and heart walls.

"The goal is to develop techniques where we are not only making just small incisions but actually working to repair defects inside the heart while the heart is still beating," del Nido said in an interview.

A single variant of a gene is linked to an increased risk for both rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, providing support for the idea that common risk genes and disease pathways are involved in many autoimmune disorders, authors including researchers at the Broad Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Biogen Idec report.

Giving critically ill patients recombinant human erythropoetin did not reduce the need for red-blood-cell transfusions, but it may reduce deaths in trauma patients, according to an article by researchers including doctors from the Boston University School of Medicine and University of Massachusetts Medical School.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

The state's top judge this morning characterized the campaign to stop construction of a high-security laboratory in Boston's South End as a not-in-my-backyard squabble.

The remarks from Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court came during arguments in a case filed by 10 Boston residents who sued to block the Biosafety Level-4 laboratory being built on Boston University's medical school campus. The lab, a cornerstone in the Bush administration's effort to combat bioterrorism, will give scientists the ability to work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and anthrax.

A contingent of residents living near the lab have spent more than four years battling the facility, which is already rising along Albany Street and expected to open in the fall of 2008. The neighbors have argued that the lab's work will put their lives at risk and that BU and the National Institutes of Health, which is underwriting the facility's construction, unfairly located it in an area with a high population of minority and low-income residents.

The Fenway Institute at Fenway Community Health has won a five-year, $1 million government grant to study the health of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered population.

Researchers will look at the transmission of HIV, characteristics of families and households, and the demographics of health, illness, disability and death among LGBT people. The funding comes from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Seven Massachusetts researchers have won grants from a new government program to study how genes and the environment interact, the National Institutes of Health announced today.

Through the Genes, Environment and Health Initiative, researchers will study the genetics of such diseases as diabetes, cancer, heart disease and tooth decay. To learn about the environmental component, scientists will develop ways to monitor personal exposure, whether to toxins or to physical activity.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, led by Stacey Gabriel, will receive $3.8 million to become one of two genotyping centers for the initiative. The other is at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Dr. Robert A. Greenes says it's hard to leave Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital, after 40 years, but the chance to build a new biomedical informatics program in Arizona is too good to pass up.

"Harvard and the Brigham have provided a wonderful environment for my professional activity," he said in an e-mail message last night. "My decision to leave Boston after many years of working closely with so many wonderful colleagues was not easy but became irresistible as I learned more about what the opportunity could be."

Greenes, a Harvard Medical School radiology professor and program director of a Harvard-MIT training program in medical informatics, is joining Arizona State University, whose faculty teaches medical students at the new Phoenix branch of the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

He is the second prominent biomedical informatics researcher to leave Harvard for a new program, following Stephen Wong, who took about 20 lab staffers with him to Methodist Hospital Research Institute in Houston.

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

A federal health agency ruled this morning that a high-security research laboratory being built in Boston's bustling South End does not present a serious threat to the neighborhood's safety and that it would not have been safer if located in a less-congested area.

The decision from the National Institutes of Health removed another barrier to the 2008 opening of the Boston University lab, where scientists will be able to study the deadliest germs in the world, including Ebola, anthrax, and plague.

Three studies by Boston authors appear in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association.

A study from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute found that a diet high in meat, fat, sweets and refined grains may be associated with a higher risk of colon cancer recurrence and death in people who had surgery and chemotherapy to treat stage III colon cancer.

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital report that people with diabetes have an increased risk of death in the first month and first year after they have a heart attack or unstable angina compared with people who have these acute coronary syndromes but do not have diabetes.

A new measure of a lipid protein ratio is no better at predicting coronary heart disease than traditional methods of measuring cholesterol, Boston University School of Medicine investigators from the Framingham Study say.

Boston University graduate student Ogi Ogas (on right in photo) used his knowledge of how the brain works to prepare for "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," as he described in this Globe story last year. He was one answer away from winning it all, but he did take home $500,000. In a quiz show airing at 7 p.m. Sunday he gets another chance.

The cognitive neuroscience student is competing for a smaller prize -- $100,000 -- on the Game Show Network's Grand Slam, which pits 16 game show players in head-to-head confrontations. All of the contestants except Ogas are either game show champions or million-dollar winners on "Jeopardy," "Millionaire" or other game shows. Ranked ninth, Ogas faces 8th-seed Nancy Christy (at left), who won $1 million on "Millionaire."

In an interview, he wouldn't say how the match turns out. He plans to watch the previously taped show with friends at home in the Leather District, where he bought a condo with his "Millionaire" winnings.

After spending three decades in Boston, sexual-medicine expert Dr. Irwin Goldstein (left) has landed in San Diego, where he is creating a center to treat and study sexual problems at Alvarado Hospital, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.

Goldstein, 57, left Boston University School of Medicine and the 5,000-patient Institute for Sexual Medicine two years ago. The urologist told the Globe at the time that he lost the school's support for a more multidisciplinary approach in the institute he founded.

Unlike professors elsewhere, faculty at BU's School of Medicine have no tenure, allowing them to be dismissed at any point, the Globe story said.

"The medical center was unable to reach an acceptable agreement with Dr. Goldstein and therefore decided not to continue his contract," BU spokeswoman Ellen Berlin said in May 2005.

Two scientists from Boston University and a Harvard-MIT program have engineered an organism to fight bacterial biofilms.

Writing in the online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Timothy K. Lu and James J. Collins report that they created a bacteriophage -- a virus that infects bacterial cells -- that releases an enzyme to attack bo