Via Reuters: "Having the television on in the background while pre-schoolers play with their toys disrupts their efforts to sustain attention, even when they don't pay much attention to it, and may harm their development, researchers report in current issue the journal Child Development.

Pediatricians recommend no TV for children under age 2, yet studies show that three quarters of very young children in America live in homes where the TV is on most of the time, notes the research team led by Dr. Marie Evans Schmidt of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston."

A new article co-authored by Children's Hospital Boston researchers -- and published in the July 10 British Medical Journal -- sheds light on that awkward, age-old question: how do I talk to my kids about sex?

According to a story on the study from the Los Angeles Times, you take a class.

Researchers from Boston have discovered six new genes implicated in autism. The genes normally make new brain connections needed for learning, but their absence or silence apparently places them among many mutations that lead to the devastating disorder, which is marked by trouble with communication and social interaction.

Writing in tomorrow's issue of Science, Dr. Christopher Walsh (left) of Children's Hospital Boston and his co-authors say in some of the genetic mutations they found, the genes were present but the on/off switches they controlled were broken.

"People think of genetic diseases as immutable and untreatable," Walsh said in an interview. "Studies like ours and others give more hope we might not need to replace genes one by one, but find other ways of activating the genes that might be silent."

They call it "surveillance sans frontieres."

Exhibit A is the SARS outbreak and how information on it spread. The deadly respiratory disease was first suspected from Chinese news stories about a steep rise in emergency department visits. Then media reports of healthcare workers suffering from an acute respiratory ailment were picked up by Canadian global health trackers. At the same time traffic about the outbreak was spiking on the ProMED online disease-reporting network. Chinese government reports lagged far behind these unofficial sources.

With that 2002 outbreak in mind, Children's Hospital Boston informatics experts created a way to distill a variety of information sources on infectious disease outbreaks around the world into one free Web-based system called the HealthMap Project. They tested the approach, which mixes local news media reports, international health bulletins, discussion forums, and government data, and report on its successes and remaining gaps in the open-access journal PLoS Medicine.

"Web-based electronic information sources can play an important role in early event detection and support situational awareness by providing current, highly local information about outbreaks, even from areas relatively invisible to traditional global public health efforts," John Brownstein and his co-authors write.

Putting children as young as 8 years old on statin medications to lower their cholesterol levels is worrisome without knowing the long-term effects of the drugs and dismaying when other avenues haven't been exhausted, two Massachusetts doctors say in today's New York Times.

“What are the data that show this is helpful preventing heart attacks?” Dr. Darshak Sanghavi, a pediatric cardiologist and assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, asks in the story. “How many heart attacks do we hope to prevent this way? There’s no data regarding that."

The American Academy of Pediatrics released recommendations on Monday that say statins could be used in children as young as 8 to prevent the development of heart disease later in life. Dr. David Ludwig, director of the childhood obesity program at Children’s Hospital Boston, acknowledges the difficulty of treating a child who already shows signs of cardiovascular disease. But he finds the larger picture troubling.

“My concern is what this is saying about society when we are so quick to prescribe drugs for these conditions before having systematically attacked the problem from the public health perspective,” he told the Times.

Dr. Judah Folkman (left) labored for decades before his theories about fighting cancer won support. Now a provision of the state's $1 billion life sciences bill signed today by Governor Deval Patrick will make the way smoother for young researchers faced with shrinking research dollars.

The Dr. Judah Folkman Higher Education Grant Fund, named for the beloved Children's Hospital Boston doctor and researcher who died suddenly in January, will help graduate-level students, doctoral students, and post-doctoral fellows with living expenses while they study or work in the life sciences. Grants of $5,000 to $15,000 will go to Massachusetts residents with a total household income below 300 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $30,000 for a single person.

“One of Judah’s greatest gifts and passions was identifying brilliant young scientists and supporting and investing in them during the early part of their careers," Dr. James Mandell, president and CEO of Children’s, said in a statement. "He was deeply troubled by the recent decline in NIH funding, which has discouraged many young talented people from choosing careers in science. This fund is a great way to honor Judah’s legacy and at the same time help new investigators commit to a career in the life sciences.”

Two scientists from MIT and Children's Hospital Boston are among 20 scholars who today won Pew grants to help them pursue promising research early in their careers.

Laurie A. Boyer (left), assistant professor of biology at MIT, is figuring out how embryonic stem cells orchestrate the genetic programs that transform cells into different kinds of tissues throughout the body, with an eye toward both stem cell therapies and the disruption in development that gives rise to disease.

Richard I. Gregory (left), an assistant professor in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Children’s and Harvard Medical School, is on the trail of microRNAs, tracking how they might be involved in development, both when it proceeds normally and when it goes awry and becomes cancer. He is also studying similar steps in stem cells.

Their $240,000 awards are given over four years. The program is funded by Pew Charitable Trusts through a grant to the University of California at San Francisco.

By Neil Munshi, Globe Correspondent

Worried that sham procedures are endangering patients and giving stem cells a bad name, leading researchers today announced a set of guidelines governing research and treatment.

“Because of the spotlight on stem cells, there’s been a misconception by some patients that the cure is already here,” said Dr. George Q. Daley, president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, which issued the draft guidelines at their sixth annual meeting in Philadelphia. “We need to be clear that the path to cures is a long and arduous one…it can take years, sometimes decades, and we’re just at the beginning of that process.”

The guidelines – which will provide a basis from which patients, doctors and scientists alike can judge clinics and treatments – deal with the quality control and regulation of cell processing and manufacturing, pre-clinical studies, and clinical research.

“We have the sense that the field is moving very rapidly and stem cell science is moving ahead by leaps and bounds,” said Daley, also the associate director of the Stem Cell Program at Children’s Hospital Boston. “Yet we are concerned as stem cell scientists that there may be a misunderstanding that the clinical relevance is more advanced than it really is – and this creates a potential for the exploitation of patients.”

Doctors and scientists are seeing this, Daley said, in the proliferation of Web sites that purport to provide treatments for everything from neurodegenerative diseases like ALS and Parkinson’s to spinal cord injuries – for a price that can rise above $100,000.

“Patients should be highly suspicious if they are being asked to fly off to far off places that don’t operate under the jurisdiction of any regulatory agency,” Daley said, given that only blood stem cell transplants have demonstrated any proven treatment benefits. “When we move outside that realm, everything becomes highly experimental.”

Risk factors for developing eating disorders are different for girls and boys, and a mother’s history may affect girls differently depending how old they are, a Boston study reports.

Alison E. Field of Children’s Hospital Boston and her colleagues report in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine on their study following more than 12,000 sons and daughters of participants in the Nurses Health Study II to see what influences might predict eating disorders. The girls and boys answered questionnaires every 12 or 18 months for seven years, starting when they were 9 to 15 years old. Their mothers were asked if they themselves had ever had an eating disorder.

After seven years, 10 percent of the girls and 3 percent of the boys said they were binge eating – overeating and feeling out of control -- or purging – vomiting or using laxatives to keep from gaining weight -- at least once a week. For girls, purging was more common than binge eating. For boys, the opposite was true. Few boys or girls did both, the study said.

Children's Hospital Boston took two top honors on US News & World Report ratings of pediatric hospital specialties released this morning. Massachusetts General Hospital for Children placed lower in the rankings of specialty care at 30 hospitals, compiled from pediatrician surveys and hospital data.

Children's placed first in two of seven categories of care: digestive disorders and heart care and heart surgery, the magazine said. It came in second on general pediatrics, cancer, and neurology and neurosurgery; third in neonatal care; and fourth in respiratory disorders.

Mass. General's children's center was rated 21st in general pediatrics, 27th in digestive disorders, 16th in neonatal care, and 17th in respiratory disorders. It did not finish in the top 30 for the other three specialties.

The specialty rankings were based on reputation, outcomes, and other measures such as nursing care and advanced technology. Last fall Children's came in second, behind Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, in a different US News list of pediatric hospitals that included data on mortality, nurse staffing, and advanced care.

In the current rankings, Boston Children's and the Philadelphia hospital flip between first and second place in four categories. Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore is the only other first-place finisher, in neurology and neurosurgery.

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."

The childhood obesity epidemic could finally be leveling off, according to new national figures.

A report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the current Journal of the American Medical Association found no significant increase in weight problems among more than 8,000 children tracked in four two-year periods starting in 1999. The estimates are based on body mass index, a measure of height and weight, from CDC growth charts. It also found no decrease.

"We need to keep the corks in the champagne bottles," pediatric obesity specialist Dr. David S. Ludwig of Children's Hospital Boston said in an interview. "I think this is the first glimmer of hope after 25 years of overwhelmingly negative information about childhood obesity prevalence, but it's much too soon to know if it's a fundamental change in the nature of the obesity epidemic in children or a temporary lull."

The National Academy of Sciences elected 72 new members today, honoring a total of 15 scientists and engineers from Harvard and MIT.

The private organization, established by Congress while Abraham Lincoln was president, advises the federal government on science and technology.

A national nurses organization has renewed Massachusetts General Hospital's "magnet" hospital designation through 2012.

The American Nurses Credentialing Center today announced the designation for Mass. General, which was the first in the state to receive magnet status in 2003. The name refers to how well hospitals can attract and retain nurses during a shortage. There are five other magnet hospitals in Massachusetts:

-Baystate Medical Center, Springfield
-Children's Hospital Boston
-Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston
-Jordan Hospital, Plymouth
-Winchester Hospital

Remember the fanfare when Fate Therapeutics was launched last year?

The startup's goal is to capitalize on the promise of stem cells. To do that it gathered the leading lights of the field, including founders Dr. David Scadden of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital and Dr. Leonard Zon of Harvard University and Children's Hospital Boston. Robert S. Langer Jr. and Ram Sasisekharan of MIT sit on the scientific advisory board.

Find out on xconomy.com how venture capitalists brought them (and other stem-cell stars) together, including a fateful meeting at a French restaurant near Mass. General.

Hospitalized children who receive medications made for adults are at greater risk for suffering harm, a national organization said today while issuing recommendations on how to avoid drug errors.

The Joint Commission, a private group that accredits US hospitals and other healthcare organizations, is sending out a Sentinel Event Alert urging hospitals to adopt standards for safely calculating the doses of medicine for children and encouraging manufacturers to formulate drugs specifically for children.

Sleep is not expendable.

When children routinely don't get enough sleep or when the sleep they get is disrupted, they are at higher risk for obesity, learning difficulties, and behavioral problems, according to articles in a special issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Parents sometimes respond to early troubles getting their children to fall asleep or stay asleep with tactics -- such as nighttime snacks -- that work for a while but lead to other problems later.

"Whenever you have disrupted sleep at night in children, it can adversely affect their attention, neurocognition, and memory in the daytime," Dr. Sanjeev Kothare of the Children's Hospital Boston sleep center said in an interview. He was not involved in the Archives studies.

By David Abel, Globe Staff

A renowned pediatrician and best-selling author who served for 14 years as chief of ambulatory pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston was accused of sexually abusing at least seven children in his care in a lawsuit filed today in Suffolk Superior Court.

The lawsuit, filed by one unnamed plaintiff, alleges that Dr. Melvin D. Levine "sexually assaulted, battered, and abused" him between 1980 and 1985.

"Levine, during his treatment sessions, under the guise of performing repeated but unnecessary physical examinations, sexually assaulted John No. 5, including numerous acts of genital fondling, masturbation, and other attempted and threatened acts of assault," the lawsuit alleges.

In a statement, Levine’s Boston lawyer Edward Mahoney said the doctor is innocent.

"Dr. Mel Levine has provided pediatric care to more than 15,000 children over 40 years and categorically denies that he has ever been abusive in any way toward any patient," Mahoney said. "He adamantly denies these claims. Dr. Levine is distressed about the distorted or misinterpreted memories from decades past, and questions the motivations. He prefers not to participate further in counsel’s efforts to obtain free advertising for his legal practice."

Children dying of cancer are suffering less as their care focuses more on easing their symptoms than aggressively treating their disease, a Harvard study has found.

Writing in tomorrow’s Journal of Clinical Oncology, Dr. Joanne Wolfe, also of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital Boston, reports that the principles of palliative care, including better communication and better pain control, have contributed to improved quality of care at the end of life.

The study compares 119 children who died between 1997 and 2004 at Dana-Farber or Children’s to 102 children who died there between 1990 and 1997 whose parents were part of an earlier survey. In the later group, hospice was discussed earlier and more often, do-not-resuscitate orders were put in place earlier, and the number of deaths in the intensive care unit dropped, the study found. Parents said their children suffered less from pain and trouble breathing in the later group and more parents said they were prepared for death in the child’s last month of life compared with the earlier group.

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

The death of a Florida teenager after breast surgery, even though it was triggered by a rare reaction to anesthesia, is raising questions about operations to improve young patients' appearance.

Stephanie Kuleba, 18, died Saturday in an outpatient surgery center in Boca Raton after she suffered a reaction to general anesthesia. She was having surgery to correct inverted nipples and breast asymmetry, which would typically involve placing an implant in the smaller breast to match the bigger one.

While he is not familiar with the case, a spokesman for the American Society of Plastic Surgeons said under the group’s guidelines, almost no one under 18 would get breast augmentation surgery because of the difficulty obtaining truly informed consent. He does few rhinoplasties, or “nose jobs,” in patients under 17 for the same reason, although parents are responsible for medical decisions involving their minor children.

“Young people see only the end results: bigger breasts,” Dr. Richard Ehrlichman, a Wellesley plastic surgeon, said in an interview. “They don’t see the risks, they don’t see what recovery means.”

Melanie Joy McDaniel (left) was nine months old and had already had two operations to remove a malignant brain tumor when her parents chose to enroll her in an experimental drug trial at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, according to a 2002 story in the New York Times.

Instead of standard chemotherapy, the trial for children with incurable cancer would offer drugs intended to choke off the blood supply to tumors by disrupting the growth of new blood vessels, the story said. The approach, called antiangiogenesis, was developed by Dr. Judah Folkman (left) of Children's Hospital Boston.

Melanie's father, Paul McDaniel, e-mailed the Times again after Folkman's death in January “to celebrate the accomplishments of Dr. Folkman, who faced resistance on his ideas that, by the grace of God, cured my daughter of an incurable brain tumor," a story in today's Times says.

Melanie is now 7 and attending first grade.

“The doctors told us last year that they do not see any residual tumor in her brain," her father told the Times. "Their original diagnosis was that her tumor had no known cure."

A national group of pediatric research institutions is pushing for more federal funding to find cures for children's diseases.

Children's Hospital Boston is one of nine pediatric centers backing a bill introduced last week in the US Senate that would bump up funding and create 20 research networks for basic research and clinical trials. Each network would receive a five-year grant of up to $2.5 million per year, the Coalition for Pediatric Medical Research said. The bill was introduced by Senator Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Senator Christopher Bond, R-Missouri.

A cardiac team from Boston saw this sign when they arrived at a hospital in Ghana last week:

"Free pediatric cardiac surgeries!! In conjunction with the Boston Children's Hospital of the Harvard University, USA," a blog about the trip notes.

Dr. Francis Fynn-Thompson of Children's Hospital Boston is leading a team of 25 doctors, nurses, technicians, and other volunteers who are in the country this week, treating heart disease and surgically repairing heart defects in infants and children at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital at the University of Ghana. The group is also offering training on how to care for children with heart problems.

They have plenty of potential patients in their limited time there, team writer and photographer Matt Cyr says on the blog.

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Fetal surgeons can heal the tiniest bodies imaginable, repairing heart defects, rerouting circulation, or restoring organs to their proper places before birth. But as imaging, intensive care, and surgical techniques have leapt forward, they have brought new ethical questions with them.

Does the pregnant woman have a duty to allow a medical procedure that might help the fetus she is carrying? How does her risk weigh against any obligation to the future child? What conditions are serious enough to warrant risk to the woman and the fetus?

At a Harvard Medical School forum Wednesday, Dr. Russell Jennings, head of fetal surgery at Children's Hospital Boston, showed about 50 people how far his specialty has come in the past 20 years. He also flatly and firmly stated his opinion on who his patients are.

"Mom isn't just a vessel," he said. "Whatever we do, we have to go through her in some way. It is incumbent on us to minimize the risk."

Depressed doctors-in-training made six times as many medication mistakes as their fellow physicians, according to a Harvard study that also found that burnout did not lead to more errors.

Residency programs have been scrutinized for the mental and physical demands they place on doctors, but this is the first paper to study the relationship between burnout, depression, and medication errors, Dr. Amy Fahrenkopf, lead author of the article appearing online in the British Medical Journal, said in an interview.

The small number of residents in the study, however, means that the results are not conclusive.

The researchers found that one-fifth of the doctors in two pediatric residency programs were depressed, nearly twice the national average for the general population. Just under three-quarters of the residents fit the criteria for burnout, defined as feeling emotionally exhausted and depersonalized at work. Almost all of the depressed residents -- whose symptoms were felt at home and at work -- also reported burnout, but only one-quarter of those with burnout also qualified as depressed.

"Depression seems to be a hidden pitfall of residency," Fahrenkopf of Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston said. "That is not only a danger for residents but it appears to be a danger for their patients as well."

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.

A Cambridge nonprofit formed to improve medical products for children is introducing a new program today to develop safer pediatric medicines, naming the former dean of Dartmouth Medical School to lead the initiative.

The Institute for Pediatric Innovation, founded by former Children's Hospital Boston technology-transfer executive Donald Lombardi, has appointed Dr. Stephen Spielberg (left) principal investigator of the five-year Pediatric Pharmaceutical Reformulation Program. Spielberg, who will remain on the Dartmouth faculty, has experience in industry as well as academic medicine.

By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff

In a key first step from theory to possible help for cancer patients, Boston-based scientists report today that they have managed to beat back a deadly human skin cancer in mice by targeting and destroying stem cells in the tumors.

The findings on malignant melanoma add weight to the growing belief among scientists that many types of cancer recur after treatment because of small, resilient groups of stem cells that survive and start multiplying all over again.

The research, published in tomorrow's Nature, shows that attacking melanoma stem cells is enough to halt a tumor's growth, said Dr. Markus Frank of Children's Hospital Boston, the paper's senior author. It thus offers new hope that this strategy will also work in humans -- perhaps, researchers say, within a few years.

"If this works with melanoma, this may also work with other tumors that are notoriously difficult to treat" once they have spread, said Dr. George Murphy, an author on the paper and chief of dermatopathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

By Scott Allen, Globe Staff

Dr. Judah Folkman, a world famous cancer researcher whose insights led to a whole new field of medicine, knew that his relentless pursuit of ideas could wear people out. For 36 years, sometimes in the face of deep skepticism, the renowned Children's Hospital Boston researcher stuck by his belief that tumors could be stopped by cutting off the blood supply they need to grow -- even when his experiments sometimes fizzled.

"If your idea succeeds, everybody says you're persistent," Dr. Folkman liked to joke. "If it doesn't succeed, you're stubborn."

Dr. Folkman, 74, collapsed and died Monday at Denver International Airport while he was awaiting a flight to Vancouver for a medical conference. The cause of death has not yet been determined.

Yesterday, friends and colleagues remembered Moses Judah Folkman as one of the world's most brilliant -- and persistent -- medical researchers, a man whose work has spawned 10 new cancer drugs and launched dozens more into various stages of human testing. Along the way, Dr. Folkman's research into the role of blood vessels in fostering disease also produced breakthrough treatments for a leading cause of blindness. He also made the pivotal discovery in the development of a form of birth control that is implanted under the woman's skin.

"He was indefatigable and unquenchable. There's no such thing in his lexicon as a defeat. It's only a learning point," said Dr. David Nathan, the former president of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who often debated cancer ideas with Dr. Folkman when Nathan was chief of medicine at Children's. "There are very few Roman candles like him."

By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff

Boston-based autism researchers have pinpointed a genetic "hot spot" where DNA errors appear to increase a child's chances of developing autism one-hundred-fold.

The discovery, reported on-line in the New England Journal of Medicine this afternoon, stems from the most extensive genome scanning for autism done so far. The scans found that in just over 1 percent of people with autism, a chunk of about 25 genes had been either duplicated or deleted, mainly in spontaneous mutations not carried by their parents.

Some researchers believe such copy-number errors help explain how autism can often crop up in families seemingly out of nowhere. Diagnoses of autism have skyrocketed in recent years, and the disorder now affects an estimated 1 in every 150 American children.

"It's like having a recipe where you take some of the ingredients and use half as much or twice as much," said Dr. David T. Miller of Children's Hospital Boston. "It's going to change how the recipe turns out."

One percent may sound small, Miller said. But "it is significant in terms of getting another piece of the puzzle solved" -- a puzzle that has largely stymied researchers even as parents have pleaded for answers and cures.

The findings also hold the promise that more such hot spots will explain a much larger portion of autism cases, and that studying the genes involved will cast new light on what goes wrong. Autism is seen as a spectrum of social and communication disorders that usually begin in early childhood.

The Muscular Dystrophy Association announced today that it has appointed Louis M. Kunkel, professor of pediatrics and genetics at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston, chairman of its scientific advisory committee, which reviews grant applications for basic science research.

In the late 1980s, Kunkel led a team that identified the muscle protein dystrophin and described how its loss is the underlying cause of the most common childhood form of muscular dystrophy.

Kunkel, also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, has served on the science panel for 15 years.

Romanian children who were placed in orphanages at birth improved their cognitive development significantly if they were moved to foster homes, particularly before turning 2 years old, a Harvard study has found.

Children who live in institutions from a very early age suffer delays in development, from low IQs that would be called mental retardation by US standards, to lags in language and problems with behavior, according to previous research. This new study in Science, by lead author Charles A. Nelson III of Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston, is the first randomized clinical trial to compare the intellectual and developmental levels of children who remained in orphanages with children who moved to foster homes. Children from the Bucharest area who had never been in institutions were a control group. A story in the Globe last year described the ongoing study.

Children have been weighing progressively more since the 1970s, the first phase of the obesity epidemic that now has entered a second phase of serious health problems related to overweight, Dr. David S. Ludwig of Children's Hospital Boston writes in tomorrow's New England Journal of Medicine.

He warns that we are approaching the point when the medical problems become life-threatenting, as noted in two articles also appearing in the journal that track coronary heart disease in adults who were obese as children. After that comes a fourth phase, when obesity is accelerated from generation to generation.

But it doesn't have to unfold that way, he argues, given what is now known about the power of a healthful diet and physical activity.

"Like global warming, the obesity epidemic is a looming crisis that requires action before all the scientific evidence is in," Ludwig writes. "I believe that obesity differs in one important respect from global warming: simple solutions are available, and with a comprehensive national strategy, we may be able to implement them without great sacrifice."

Some of Boston's heavy hitters in stem cell biology announced today that they have launched a company to commercialize technology that will reprogram mature adult cells into stem cells.

Dr. David Scadden of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital and Dr. Leonard Zon of Harvard University and Children's Hospital Boston are among the founders of Fate Therapeutics. Biomedical engineers Robert Langer and Ram Sasisekharan of MIT will sit on the new biotech's scientific advisory board. The Waltham venture capital company Polaris Venture Partners is a founding investor, with general partner Amir Nashat taking a seat on its board of directors.

The company has a facility in Seattle, and plans to open other offices soon in the Boston area as well as in California.

Dr. David Williams (left) has been appointed chief of hematology/oncology and director of clinical and translational research at Children’s Hospital Boston. He will succeed Dr. Samuel Lux, who was division chief for almost 24 years.

Williams comes to Children’s from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. His wife, Cindy Williams, also of Cincinnati Children’s, will join Boston Children’s as program director for nursing research.

About 1 in 7 teenagers in Massachusetts and Vermont might have a substance abuse problem, according to screening questionnaires filled out during routine doctors’ visits, a study has found. The adolescents' answers were more likely to indicate a problem during an appointment when they were sick or injured than when they were having a checkup.

“Substance abuse screening should occur whenever the opportunity arises, not at well-child care visits only,” wrote Dr. John R. Knight of Children’s Hospital Boston, lead author of the study in this month’s Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

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."

From left, Daley, Engle, Haber and Karumanchi

Four Boston physician-scientists have been selected by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in an initiative to promote patient-oriented research.

Dr. George Daley and Dr. Elizabeth Engle, both of Children’s Hospital Boston, Dr. Daniel Haber of Massachusetts General Hospital, and Dr. S. Ananth Karumanchi of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are among 15 new HHMI Investigators. Boston has the most winners in this new group.

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Pediatric residents in Massachusetts and around the country gathered at noon today to push for expansion of a children's insurance plan that President Bush has threatened to veto.

At Boston Medical Center, about 50 residents, pediatricians, nurses and social workers paused in the hospital's main lobby as part of "Stand Up for SCHIP," the insurance program that covers children who don't qualify for Medicaid. There would have been one more, but that resident stayed behind in the intensive care unit with a child in respiratory distress, chief resident Marie Clark told the group. The child's father couldn't afford the asthma medication prescribed during an office visit on Friday, Dr. Suzanne Steinbach added, as an example of how lack of insurance hurts children.

"All of us here have had the same story," Dr. Barry Zuckerman, chief of pediatrics, said. "All of us are asking the president to do the right thing for children."

At noon today, pediatric residents across the country will join a 15-minute Stand up for SCHIP to urge President Bush not to veto an expansion of coverage for uninsured children who don't qualify for Medicaid.

The action started at Stanford's Lucile Packard Children's Hosptial in California but soon spread to dozens of hospitals, including Boston Medical Center, Children's Hospital Boston and UMass Memorial Medical Center in Massachusetts. The House and Senate have voted to reauthorize and expand the State Children's Health Insurance Plan, but the president has said he would veto it.

"It means children who could be covered won't be and the possibility that some children already covered may lose their insurance," Dr. Barry Zuckerman of Boston Medical Center said in an interview yesterday. "We see the consequences when patients don't get care when they don't have insurance."

A group from Children's Hospital Boston has been hired by a corporate consortium to develop online medical records for their employees.

Dossia, a group of eight major employers including Wal-Mart and Intel, chose the Children's Hospital Informatics Program to adapt its own program called Indivo to provide secure health records for 5 million employees and their dependents and retirees.

The Children's program, which also has ties to Harvard and MIT, has been working for 10 years to create Web-based records for patients that include a lifetime of health information across different doctors and care sites. The Dossia goal is to allow its workers to have access to their medical records, to communicate with their doctors, and to pull together information from different sources, the group said.

Dossia does not disclose details of its contracts, Colette Cote, a spokeswoman for member Pitney-Bowes and Dossia, said when asked about the financial terms of the agreement with Children's. The other companies in Dossia are AT&T, Sanofi-aventis, Applied Materials, BP America Inc. and Cardinal Health.

Indivo will be introduced at Children's this fall and Dossia plans to roll out its version to some members by the end of the year, its statement said.

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 Harvard Medical School physician-scientist has been named dean of the Duke University School of Medicine, the North Carolina school announced today.

Dr. Nancy C. Andrews (left), dean for basic sciences and graduate studies at Harvard Medical School, is the first woman to fill the position, Duke said. She will succeed Dr. R. Sanders Williams, who was promoted to senior vice chancellor for academic affairs at Duke.

Andrews, 48, is a pediatric hematologist/oncologist at Children's Hospital Boston and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She previously directed the Harvard/MIT MD/PhD program. A member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, she was a Howard Hughes Investigator from 1993 to 2006.

Andrews earned bachelor's and master's degrees in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University, a Ph.D. in biology from MIT, and an MD from Harvard Medical School. She completed her residency at Children's and a fellowship in pediatric hematology/oncology at Children's and Dana-Farber.

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Massachusetts adults are the second-leanest in the country, according to a report released today, but the state's younger residents rank in the middle on the overweight scale.

The adult obesity rate was 19.8 percent, placing the state higher than only Colorado. For children age 10 to 17, the rate of being overweight was 13.6 percent, or 27th highest on the national list in the fourth annual "F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America, 2007" from the Trust for America's Health. Almost a third of American adults are obese, it said.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will launch two new fellowship programs in medical microbiology, the hospital said.

Both are designed to teach doctors to understand bacterial agents, parasites and viruses and to run academic, hospital or public health laboratories. The fellows will train at Children's Hospital Boston and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health as well as Beth Israel Deaconess.

Children's Hospital Boston came in second in a US News & World Report ranking of pediatric hospitals, the magazine said today.

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia took first place and Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore finished third on a list of 30 pediatric hospitals. This is the first time the magazine has created a separate ranking for pediatric hospitals or children's hospitals within a medical center.

The rankings are based on reputation, death rates and care-related measures such as volume, nursing care, advanced technology and outside recognition.

A Brown University neuroscientist has won Germany's top honor for basic neurological research for creating a device that translates thought into action.

John P. Donoghue, who developed a brain implant called BrainGate that allows paralyzed people to use their thoughts to move a computer cursor, control a wheelchair or operate a robotic arm, will receive one of two K.J. Zulch prizes next week. The other goes to University of Melbourne professor emeritus Graeme Clark, who invented the cochlear implant.

Dr. Robert Ian McCaslin of Children's Hospital Boston has been named director of Mo HealthNet, the Medicaid agency for the state of Missouri, Governor Matt Blunt said. He has been an attending physician in the pediatric emergency department at Children's and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.

Each year MIT's Technology Review names 35 innovators under 35 for its TR35. This year eight technologists and scientists from New England make the list.

David Berry, 29, Flagship Ventures, Cambridge: renewable petroleum from microbes
Adam Cohen, 28, of Harvard University: making molecules motionless
Ali Khademhosseini, 31, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology: improving engineered tissues
Ivan Kristic, 21, One Laptop per Child (on leave from Harvard): making antivirus software obsolete
Christopher Loose, 27, SteriCoat, Cambridge: beating up bacteria
Anna Lysyanskaya, 31, Brown University: Securing online privacy
Kristala Jones Prather, 34, MIT: reverse-engineering biology
Mehmet Yanik, 29, MIT: stopping light on microchips

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Children whose private health insurance does not pay for new recommended vaccines may not be eligible to receive them in public programs, leaving them more vulnerable than if they had no insurance, according to a Harvard study.

These gaps are occurring as the number and cost of new vaccines have escalated. New vaccines recommended for children have doubled in the past five years and the cost to fully vaccinate a child -- about $1,170 -- is 7.5 times higher in 2007 than it was in 1995, Dr. Grace M. Lee of Harvard Medical School and colleagues write in tomorrow’s Journal of the American Medical Association. They surveyed state immunization program managers in 48 states from January to June 2006.

"We assumed kids with health insurance would have coverage for vaccinations, but we found a group of children whose insurance didn’t cover the cost of vaccine. That to me was surprising," Lee said in an interview.

Harvard scientists have answered a question that lingered after Korean scientists retracted their fraudulent claim
that they had cloned the first human embryonic stem cells: Where did the stem cell line they created come from?

Kitai Kim, Dr. George Q. Daley (left) and their colleagues at Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute report today in Cell Stem Cell that the embryonic stem cells created by the Korean lab resulted not from somatic cell nuclear transfer, a technique in which a person's DNA is injected into a donor egg cell that has had its own DNA removed, but from parthenogenesis, the process of making an embryo from the donor egg alone.

Cells derived from parthenogenesis carry a distinct genetic fingerprint because they have a duplicate set of chromosomes from the egg. Most of the genetic sequences are identical, but some show differences from the donor egg. Investigators looking into the Korean claims last year said parthenogenesis could not explain these different patterns, the paper said.

Kim and Daley's group analyzed the cells further and found that the DNA differences were clustered at certain points, just as they are in experiments on parthenogenesis in mice.

The Koreans appear to have created the first human embryonic stem cells from a woman's egg alone, the paper says.

Daley's lab is studying parthenogenetic cells as another possible source of embryonic stem cells to treat disease.

A Children's Hospital interview with Daley is here.

By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff

The Board of Registration in Medicine, which licenses Massachusetts doctors, yesterday retroactively revoked the medical license of Dr. Thomas Ho, finding that he fell asleep during a surgical procedure in December 2005 and inhaled anesthetic gas while on lunch break at work the following month.

Both incidents occurred during a rotation at Children's Hospital Boston. Ho had taken a prescription drug that caused him to doze off, the board said, and when he fell asleep he was the only anesthesiologist in the operating room.

Ho, who was an anesthesiology resident based at Brigham and Women's Hospital, took a voluntary leave in January 2006. He can apply for a new license if he demonstrates at least 15 months of continuous sobriety, and compliance with a chemical dependency monitoring contract.

A Children's Hospital spokeswoman, Michelle Davis, said today: "No patient was harmed, and as soon as the situation was discovered he was discharged from Children's."

Public reporting campaign meets surgical caution on Running a Hospital today.

In this week's New England Journal of Medicine three Harvard doctors argue that making mortality rates public for individual cardiac surgeons could end up harming patients if the rankings push surgeons to avoid operating on high-risk patients.

Today Paul Levy responds in detail to the White Coat Notes post about the opinion piece in the journal, written by Dr. Thomas H. Lee of Partners Health Care, Dr. David F. Torchiana of Massachusetts General Hospital and Dr. James E. Lock of Children’s Hospital Boston.

As readers of the Beth Israel Deaconess CEO's blog know, Levy is a champion of transparency, urging other hospitals to join his in posting their performance measures. He responds to the doctors' contention that public reporting is too flawed (not adequately adjusted for risk, too small a sample) to be valid. (He also asks many questions -- it's a long entry.)

"So here's our Catch-22: No reporting method is statistically good enough to be made public," he writes. "But if a method is statistically good enough, we won't allow it to be made public."

Dr. Thomas H. Lee knows the headline he wrote is provocative: "Is Zero the Ideal Death Rate?"

But the network president of Partners Health Care and associate editor at the New England Journal of Medicine is concerned that public reporting of mortality rates for individual cardiac surgeons carries unintended, perverse consequences. He fears that surgeons might hesitate to operate on high-risk patients if they are seeking a perfect performance record, he and two colleagues write in tomorrow's issue of the journal.

"If you are being ranked, you may walk away from a patient who’s very sick, even though that patient may be at high risk for surgery but even higher risk with medicine" as treatment, he said in an interview. "When so few patients can swing things for you being ranked, we’re worried about that effect on the decision-making process."

Lee, along with co-authors Dr. David F. Torchiana, a cardiac surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Dr. James E. Lock, an interventional cardiologist at Children’s Hospital Boston, say that reporting on cardiac surgery by institution makes sense, with individual reports available only to those hospitals. Massachusetts recently joined New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania in publicly reporting death rates for individual cardiac surgeons.

They’re called "medical futility" cases, when family members and hospitals disagree on whether to continue life support for very sick patients. Although rare, they raise questions about respect for others’ viewpoints, a Children’s Hospital Boston doctor says.

Writing in tomorrow’s New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Robert D. Truog warns against laws that allow a hospital ethics committee to be "surrogate judge and jury."

He considers the recent case of 19-month-old Emilio Gonzales, whose mother went to court to prevent Austin Children’s Hospital from turning off his respirator. Emilio had a rare, fatal genetic disorder called Leigh’s disease that meant he was in intensive care for five months with declining neurological function. Under the Texas Advance Directives Act, the hospital’s ethics committee decided to withdraw life support despite the objections of his mother, Caterina Gonzales.

"I’m concerned that legislation like that in Texas makes it just too easy for people in the medical profession to override the desires of those who have unpopular views," Truog said in an interview. "We’ve got a beautiful system of laws designed to protect people from the tyranny of the majority. The Texas law just bypasses it."

Cambridge Health Alliance will accept an award today from the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems for its role in medical school curriculum change.

CHA developed a program for third-year Harvard Medical School students to follow patients for a year at one hospital instead of traditional rotations in different settings. The hospital was chosen for the 2007 Chair Award from 64 submissions, NAPH said in a statement.

Dr. Samantha L. Rosman, a third-year resident in pediatrics in Boston, has been re-elected to the American Medical Association's board of trustees. She is a 2004 graduate of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. After completing her residency, she will begin a fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine at Boston Medical Center.

Dr. Karen Shedlack (left), medical adviser for the mental retardation division of Vinfen, has won a 2007 Distinguished Fellowship from the American Psychiatric Association.

Before joining Vinfen, a private, nonprofit human services organization based in Cambridge, Shedlack was medical director for the adult developmental disabilities program at McLean Hospital and worked in the department of psychology and brain science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Virgin Life Care has named three Boston academics to its science advisory board.

A subsidiary of the Virgin group headed by Sir Richard Branson, the Boston company develops activity-based health rewards programs.

The board members are Dr. I-Min Lee of Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, Kyle McInnis of UMass-Boston and Jessica Whitely of UMass-Boston and Brown Medical School.

Children's Hospital Boston has honored five doctors with Community Physician Awards for the care they give in pediatric practices and community health centers.

They are Dr. Anthony Compagnone of Hyde Park Pediatrics, Dr. Debra Ann Gfeller of Holliston Pediatrics, Dr. David Holder of the Martha Eliot Health Center, Dr. Richard Marshall of Harvard Vanguard Associates at Copley and Dr. Robert Michaels of Longwood Pediatrics.