Dr. Harold J. Burstein, a medical oncologist specializing in breast cancer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, has been appointed editor-in-chief of The Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.

Joan Vitello has been named chief operating officer for Lawrence Memorial Hospital of Medford. She was previously vice president and chief nursing officer of Hallmark Health System, to which the Lawrence hospital belongs.

Dr. James H. Thrall, radiologist-in-chief at Massachusetts General Hospital, has been named chair of the American College of Radiology Board of Chancellors. Dr. John A. Patti of North Shore Medical Center was elected vice chair of the same board.

Dr. Anthony L. Zietman of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center has been elected president and chairman-elect of the American Society of Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology.

The theory has become familiar: most species respond to famine by switching their energies away from reproduction and toward maintaining their bodies on less food. Mice fed a restricted diet live longer and seem to avoid disease, lab experiments have shown.

A story in today's New York Times highlights efforts by Boston scientists to set that famine reflex into motion in people -- without the deprivation a 30-percent calorie cut would mean. David Sinclair, a scientist at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of a company pursuing drugs based on the idea, is studying two ways to activate the enzyme sirtuin, which triggers the famine response. (His company, called Sirtris, was recently acquired by GlaxoSmithKline. Sinclair is a former student of MIT biologist Leonard Guarente, who founded the field of sirtuin biology.)

A Boston hospital fired a plastic surgeon last week after he showed signs of an "impairment" during surgery, the Boston Herald reports.

Dr. Loren J. Borud, 44, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and head of Loren J. Borud Plastic Surgery, was suspended after a June 27 incident at the hospital and fired on Friday, Dr. Kenneth Sands, senior vice president of health care quality, told the Herald.

Sands did not explain what the impairment was, but said the hospital sought help from Physician Health Services, a program of the Massachusetts Medical Society through which doctors deal with alcohol problems, substance abuse, or other mental health issues.

Today Beth Israel Deaconess confirmed that Borud is no longer employed at the hospital or conducting surgery there. Citing patient and physician confidentiality, it offered no other details. That contrasts with a very public discussion of a wrong-site surgery that occurred on June 30, three days after the operation for which Borud was suspended.

Yesterday, Beth Israel Deaconess CEO Paul Levy continued the conversation on his blog, musing about comments on whether to discipline the surgeon involved in the medical error, which he weighed against the value of encouraging people to come forward when something goes wrong.

"It ... occurred to me that the easy path for a hospital administrator in this kind of environment would be to punish the wrong-doer, bolt on a new process, protocol, procedure, or requirement, and declare the problem solved. After all, that shows decisive and timely leadership," he writes. "There's only one problem. That doesn't work. Or if does, only for a short time or until a new glitch is uncovered."

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

Hoping to lure a new generation of smokers, tobacco companies routinely manipulate levels of menthol so that their cigarettes prove more appealing and less harsh to novice users, Boston researchers reported today.

Scientists from the Harvard School of Public Health scoured thousands of pages of industry documents from the 1980s, '90s, and more recently, and commissioned laboratory tests of menthol cigarettes to uncover a strategy that was decades in the making.

The researchers found that tobacco companies embrace a Goldilocks approach when launching brands: Add too little menthol, which has an effect akin to anesthesia, and tobacco retains its intense bite. Add too much, and first-time smokers are overwhelmed. Add just the right amount, and cigarettes become powerfully seductive.

A 1987 internal memo from R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., maker of the menthol Salem cq brand, succinctly summarized the benefits of low-level menthol cigarettes, as "Smoother more refreshing tobacco taste." Such a product, the memo declared, would be a "proven winner" targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds.

Via Reuters. "Diabetes makes a person about three times as likely to develop tuberculosis, and it may be to blame for more than 10 percent of TB cases in India and China," according to researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Pay for performance is intended to reward doctors for doing the right thing, but a study of the quality of care given by doctors while the incentives were rolling out in Massachusetts shows they didn't make a difference.

Writing in the current issue of Health Affairs, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and Massachusetts Health Quality Partners report that clinical quality got better in Massachusetts between 2001 and 2003 across the board. They studied doctors groups whose income was tied to a series of measures, such as how many patients got mammograms or had their diabetes monitored.

"Our results suggest that few P4P contracts were associated with greater improvement than was occurring in other practices throughout the state," the authors write. "Clearly something was going on, but what?"

Electronic health records, public reporting of quality, or tiered physician networks could have been the tides lifting all boats. But then there's money, or in the P4P practices, too little of it.

"P4P contracts in Massachusetts might not have put enough money at stake to drive additional quality improvement beyond the existing improvement trend," the authors suggest. "Incentives may need to exceed $2,000 per physician or $100,000 per physician group."

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."

Patient privacy is enshrined in ethical and legal statutes, but what about their doctors' privacy?

Two psychiatrists at Massachusetts General Hospital counsel their colleagues on the lengths their patients may go to in order to dig up digital dirt on them, from how much they paid for their houses to what their sexual orientation may be. Perhaps just as worrying as Internet stalking is the ease of stumbling onto suspect sources, they say in a commentary that warns older doctors not conversant with the Web that they ignore it at their peril.

"There may be slanderous information about a physician on the Web, published in a blog or on a Web page, by a vengeful patient, colleague, or ex-lover," Dr. Tristan Gorrindo and Dr. James E. Groves write in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Equally vexing, there may be slanderous information published about someone with the same name as an unlucky physician."

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.

Ronald Reagan once said "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' "

Cambridge doctors light years away on the political spectrum from the conservative president have written a paper that also casts the government as part of a problem. Drs. Karen Lasser, Steffie Woolhandler, and David Himmelstein of Cambridge Health Alliance plant blame for pay gaps between specialists and generalists squarely on the government, saying its policies help perpetuate a primary care physician shortage.

The doctors, who in other arenas have favored a government-funded single-payer system something like Canada's, analyzed payment data for outpatient visits and found that government sources, including Medicaid and Medicare, make up one-third of total physician income. They conclude that changes in how the government reimburses doctors could reduce gaps that in the case of geriatricians mean they are paid an average of $165,000 a year while hematologists get $504,000. Geriatricians provide primary care for elderly people while hematologists specialize in diseases of the blood, including cancer. For both geriatricians and hematologists, government payments make up more than half of their income.

Industry funding for research at Harvard is taking another hit today in a Bloomberg News report that says a leading psychology professor's work on gambling addiction was paid for by casinos.

The arrangement has come under fire before, as reported in this 2004 Globe story, but the climate may have chilled since then for such partnerships. Harvard is currently reviewing the cases of three psychiatrists who are the subjects of a Senate investigation into their failure to reveal all industry funding for their research into drugs for children.

Howard Shaffer, an associate professor of psychology in Harvard's Department of Psychiatry, heads the Institute for Research on Pathological Gambling and Related Disorders at Harvard. According to the Globe and Bloomberg stories, the institute was created in 2000 with funding from the Washington-based National Center for Responsible Gaming, which in turn, was created in 1996 by the American Gaming Association. Shaffer and the institute have received $9.1 million since 1996, the Bloomberg story says.

A prominent advocate of a single-payer national health system will make her case to a presidential commission later today.

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler (left, in file photo) of Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School is scheduled to testify at 2 p.m. before the President’s Council on Bioethics, which is meeting today and tomorrow in Chicago. The group is weighing various approaches to reforming healthcare.

An internal medicine physician, Woolhandler has researched inequalities in health and health care, administrative costs in medicine, and national health insurance. She supports the idea of a national health insurance system, under which private insurers would be eliminated and the government -- the single payer -- would cover all Americans through an expanded version of Medicare.

Other experts scheduled to present plans include Len Nichols, director of the health policy program for the New America Foundation, and James Capretta, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC.

Health experts have come together to make surgery safer around the world.

The international Safe Surgery Save Lives campaign, launched by the World Health Organization and the Harvard School of Public Health, offers simple checklists to help prevent medical errors and the complications that can follow. That can mean confirming before anesthesia that a patient has a safe airway, or making sure that an incision is made on the right patient, the right site, and for the right operation.

Dr. Atul Gawande of Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital led the standards effort. More than 200 national and international groups as well as health ministries were involved. At eight pilot sites the measures helped avoid injury and death, according to preliminary results.

US Senator Charles Grassley has been in the news this week for his investigation into three Harvard psychiatrists' payments from drug companies. On Wednesday he referred on the Senate floor to another Harvard psychiatrist, but this time the Iowa Republican was using his scholarly work as ammunition against the makers of Paxil.

The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog says Grassley cited work by Dr. Joseph Glenmullen of Harvard Medical School suggesting that when GlaxoSmithKline was testing the blockbuster antidepressant, it shunted people who had attempted suicide into a placebo group. Since people who try to commit suicide once are more likely than others to do so again, putting them in the group not taking the drug could skew comparisons with the group taking Paxil. Paxil has come under scrutiny for its association with a higher risk of suicidal behavior.

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.

Before McDonalds decided to hold the tomatoes, Americans felt pretty sure food produced in the USA was safe, but they had some doubts about eating food imported from other countries, especially Mexico and China, according to a study released today.

In a Harvard School of Public Health survey conducted before salmonella cases traced to some fresh tomatoes put a crimp in fast-food sales, people were asked a variety of questions about food safety, from how worried they were about eating sushi (very) to what they thought of the government's inspection system (not much).

All told, more than a third think US-produced food is very safe and more than half say it's somewhat safe. Almost half believe food from Mexico isn't safe, and a little more than half give the same thumbs down to food from China. Half of respondents said they check to see where foods come from before they put them in their grocery carts.

The government's inspection system got poor marks for its job ensuring food safety, earning just some or very little confidence from half of the people surveyed.

Dr. Daniel Carlat, a Newburyport psychiatrist on a campaign to separate the influence of industry from medicine, has changed his mind about the three psychiatrists facing a Senate investigation into their failure to report payments from drug makers.

After reviewing records revealed by Senator Charles Grassley, Carlat is no longer inclined to give Drs. Jospeh Biederman, Timothy Wilens, and Thomas Spencer the benefit of the doubt. Instead, he says continuing medical education provided cover for "legalized money laundering" from drug companies.

"It appears that the vast majority of the money eventually reported by the Harvard Trio, a combined $4.2 million over 7 years, was drug company money that was laundered and processed to seem like it wasn't drug company money," Carlat writes on his blog. "And this, I suspect, is why it was so easy for the doctors to rationalize not disclosing it."

Yesterday Massachusetts General Hospital leaders sent an internal memo of support and sympathy for its three doctors. Biederman's work is linked to a steep rise in bipolar diagnoses among children.

Three Harvard psychiatrists facing a US Senate inquiry got a vote of confidence from their hospital as "beloved and trusted by thousands of grateful children and families." Senator Charles Grassley is looking into the doctors' failure to report payments of more than a million dollars in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007.

A memo from top officials at Massachusetts General Hospital obtained by the Globe praised Drs. Joseph Biederman, Timothy Wilens, and Thomas Spencer as "pioneers in the field of child mental health" while also endorsing "closely managed" collaboration with industry and promising a review of conflict-of-interest policies.

"They are beloved and trusted by thousands of grateful children and families who have counted on them for treatment, counseling, help and hope. We know this is an incredibly painful time for these doctors and their families, and our hearts go out to them," Dr. Peter L. Slavin, hospital president, and Dr. David F. Torchiana, head of Massachusetts General Physicians Organization, write.

The three psychiatrists received money from companies that made the medications they researched and recommended. Biederman's work is widely linked to a steep rise in bipolar diagnoses among children.

On Sunday Biederman told the New York Times “my interests are solely in the advancement of medical treatment through rigorous and objective study.”

The full Mass. General memo follows:

Cigarette sales have been declining at a steady clip in recent years, but cheaper forms of tobacco have become more popular at the same time, Harvard scientists report.

In a research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Gregory N. Connolly and Hillel R. Alpert of the Harvard School of Public Health write that the 3.7 billion-pack, or 18 percent, drop in cigarette sales from 2000 to 2007 may have been offset by an uptick over the same period in sales of small cigars, roll-your-own tobacco, and moist snuff equivalent to 1.1 billion packs of cigarettes, or about 30 percent of the decrease in cigarette sales. Sales of large cigars also grew 37 percent during these eight years.

Newburyport psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Carlat has staked out some substantial turf on conflicts of interest.

On his blog and elsewhere, he has detailed his decision to stop speaking at medical-education conferences sponsored by drug companies, linking such activities to "biased education, corrupt physicians, and, ultimately, harm to our patients."

So it's something of a surprise to read that he is giving Dr. Joseph Biederman, Dr. Timothy E. Wilens, and Dr. Thomas Spencer of Harvard Medical School the benefit of the doubt after reading records released by US Senator Charles E. Grassley. Biederman, widely regarded as influential in the rise in bipolar diagnoses among children, and his colleagues did not disclose all the payments they received from companies that made the medications they researched and recommended.

The discrepancy is important when it comes to federal funding from the National Institutes of Health, Grassley's hearings make clear. But Carlat, who knew all three doctors during his training at Massachusetts General Hospital, thinks the lack of reporting, while perhaps "a little sleazy," falls short of malevolent.

"I don’t think they hid these payments out of greed, sneakiness, or the thrill of getting away with something. They probably simply didn’t believe these earnings were relevant to the NIH funding they received," he writes. "The big lesson here is that Congress must pass the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, because we will never be able to grasp the extent of the complex financial relationships between companies and thought leaders without this legislation."

Could it be that living in a cool, northern place makes a man more likely to have a heart attack? A new Harvard study reports that men with low levels of vitamin D – the “sunshine vitamin," known for its favorable effects on muscle cells, inflammation, vessel calcification, and blood pressure – are at greater risk of heart attacks than men with high levels of the vitamin in their system.

The results, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, held up even after accounting for a variety of risk factors, including body mass index, alcohol, physical activity, family history, ethnicity, diabetes, and levels of cholesterol, blood pressure, and triglycerides.

A New York Times report over the weekend that a Harvard psychiatrist whose work spurred a wave of bipolar diagnoses in children failed to disclose payments from the maker of drugs to treat them reminded a former Globe reporter of a similar case at Brown University.

In 1999 Alison Bass, author of the new book "Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepresssant on Trial," wrote Globe stories about Dr. Martin Keller, chief of psychiatry at Brown. He earned more than a million dollars from pharmaceutical companies whose antidepressant drugs he was writing about in medical journals and promoting at conferences. He reported some, but not all, of the income he received, Bass writes on her blog today. She compares Keller to Dr. Joseph Biederman, the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School psychiatrist described in this Globe story last year and identified in records recently revealed by Senate investigators looking into conflicts of interest.

"Just as with Biederman, Keller’s acceptance of money from the maker of a drug he was studying constitutes a blatant conflict of interest," Bass writes. "And just like Biederman, Keller failed to disclose these conflicts to the federal agencies that were rewarding him millions of dollars in research grants."

The Times story includes an e-mailed statement from Biederman:

“My interests are solely in the advancement of medical treatment through rigorous and objective study,” he wrote, and he told the Times he took conflict-of-interest policies “very seriously.”

Harvard Medical School and Boston University's dental school represent a cluster of US universities setting up shop in Dubai Healthcare City, US News and World Report notes.

Part of their success comes from a chillier climate for students from Arab countries who want to study abroad, Harvard Medical School Dubai Center's chief academic officer tells the magazine.

"What people in the region can't get is good post-graduate education," Dr. Robert Thurer is quoted as saying. "Now, many have to leave the country, but the opportunity is limited, and even more limited after September 11 with new visa restrictions."

While the Harvard name is attracting students, when it comes to healthcare, the transfer of its hospital consulting business to Partners HealthCare is drawing some consternation, according to an Arabianbusiness.com article called "Brand on the run."

Four Harvard physician-scientists are among 19 early-career researchers selected for grants to further their work bridging lab discoveries and clinical medicine.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute said today it will give each grant winner $375,000 over five years to help doctors as they are beginning their research careers. The money must be used for direct research expenses, such as hiring a technician or buying equipment, and not the awardee's own salary, HHMI said.

In another $4 million Howard Hughes initiative announced today, 10 Massachusetts medical and dental students will conduct biomedical research for a year.

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.

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.

Lots of friendships may be a hedge against the memory loss associated with aging, a new Harvard study finds.

Over the six years of the study, people with the most social ties saw their memory decline at less than half the rate of people with the fewest social connections. Social activity appeared to be a particularly strong buffer against memory decline in two groups: people with less than a high school education and people who had vascular conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or stroke.

More than 16,000 people over age 50 were tested four times from 1998 through 2004. Each time, participants were scored on five aspects of their social lives: marital status, volunteer activities, and contact with parents, children, and neighbors. To asses their memory, they were asked to recall a list of 10 common words five minutes after they first heard them and after another unrelated conversation. The participants also answered questions about their physical and mental health.

To account for the possibility that failing memory might be causing shrinking social activity, the researchers, including Karen A. Ertel of the Harvard School of Public Health, took out results from the 25 percent of people with the lowest scores on social contacts and analyzed the remaining data. The conclusions still held up, even when they tested their hypothesis further by going back to memory scores taken in 1993.

"Our results suggest that increasing social integration may be an important component of efforts to protect older Americans from memory decline," the authors write in the American Journal of Public Health.

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."

A prominent Harvard doctor is the sole finalist for the top job at a Texas university, a Dallas paper reports.

Dr. Daniel K. Podolsky (left), head of the gastrointestinal unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, chief academic officer at Partners HealthCare, and a Harvard Medical School professor, is one step away from becoming the next president of UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, according to the Dallas Morning News. He was the only candidate chosen by the UT board of regents, which must wait three weeks before making a final decision.

Podolsky, 55, would succeed Dr. Kern Wildenthal, who is stepping down in September after 22 years as head of UT Southwestern, the story says.

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.

Dr. Claudius Conrad (left), a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School, says he works better when he listens to music, according to a story in today's New York Times.

That's not so unusual. But Conrad, who also holds doctorates in stem cell biology and music philosophy, takes it a step further, the story says. He recently published results of a study suggesting that music may help patients, too, by stimulating a growth hormone more commonly associated with stress to instead exert healing and sedative effects.

He explored another idea about the soothing power of music in his dissertation on why and how Mozart’s music seemed to ease the pain of intensive-care patients, the Times story says. Conrad focused on the music's mechanisms and on the composer's own illnesses.

“Whether he did it intentionally or not,” Conrad told the Times, “I think he composed music the way he did partly because it made him feel better."

Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa (left), a neurosurgeon and brain-tumor researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was an illegal immigrant working in the vegetable fields of California before taking night classes at a community college that eventually led him to Berkeley and Harvard Medical School.

In today's New York Times, an interviewer asks him if Harvard was tough.

"Not really," he answers. "Compared to working in the fields, its was easy."

MIT biochemist Alexander Rich has won the Welch Award in Chemistry for his fundamental insights into the structure and function of RNA and DNA. He will receive the $300,000 prize in October.

Caritas Christi Health Care's senior vice president and chief information officer is leaving for Vermont. Charles H. Podesta, 50, will become chief information officer of Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, Vt., in June. Last month Roger Deshaies, formerly senior vice president for finance at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, joined Fletcher Allen as its chief financial officer. The hospital is affiliated with the University of Vermont School of Medicine.

Clifford J. Tabin, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, is one of two scientists to win the 2008 March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology. He will share the $250,000 award with Philip A. Beachy of Stanford. They are being honored for their work with "hedgehog" genes and how they affect the way embryos develop and form limbs, the brain, and other organs. Hedgehog genes got their name from the prickly appearance they gave fruit fly embryos.

Dr. Andy Whittemore, chief medical officer at Brigham and Women's Hospital, has been elected president of the American Surgical Association. Whittemore trained as a vascular surgeon, was a division chief at Brigham and Women's, and has been chief medical officer there since 1999.

By Elizabeth Cooney
Globe Correspondent

Many of the people who literally write the book on mental illness collect pay checks from companies whose products treat some of those illnesses.

Sixteen of the 28 members of a task force overseeing revision of the psychiatry profession's diagnostic bible have disclosed financial ties to drug or medical device companies, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, raising concern about possible conflicts of interest.

"To me, this doesn't pass the smell test for conflict of interest,” said Merrill Goozner, a director at the watchdog center. “What they should have done is find psychiatrists without conflicts of interest."

The American Psychiatric Association, which will oversee publication of the fifth Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, defended its choice of panel members, who include Harvard Provost Dr. Steven E. Hyman. The association also noted that all panel members have pledged not to receive more than $10,000 per year from industry sources, aside from unrestricted research grants, until the manual is published in 2012.

"We have made every effort to ensure that [the manual] will be based on the best and latest scientific research, and to eliminate conflicts of interest in its development," Carolyn B. Robinowitz, president of the psychiatric association, said in a statement.

What if doctors had better manners?

Politeness can never replace compassion, but a Beth Israel Deaconess doctor makes the case for what he calls "etiquette-based medicine" in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.

Psychiatrist Dr. Michael W. Kahn has been paying attention to what patients complain about when they're not happy with their doctors. Often what they mind the most is a rushed, impersonal brusqueness, he writes.

He experienced the opposite when he became a hospital patient himself. His European-born surgeon had Old World manners, with impeccable dress, body language, and eye contact that had a remarkably calming effect.

"It helped to confirm my suspicion that patients may care less about whether their doctors are reflective and empathetic than whether they are respectful and attentive," he writes.

Women who took folic acid and B vitamin supplements had the same rate of cardiovascular disease as women who didn't, a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports, adding to the list of substances that showed promise in earlier observational studies but not in more rigorous trials.

Researchers led by Dr. JoAnn E. Manson of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital studied 5,442 women in the health profession who were at least 42 years old and had a history of cardiovascular disease or three or more risk factors for it. For more than seven years, half were given a pill containing folic acid plus two B vitamins and half were given a matching placebo.

The supplements did lower the women's levels of homocysteine, an amino acid previously implicated in the risk of cardiovascular disease. But women randomly assigned to receive the vitamins had about the same number of heart attacks, strokes, coronary artery blockages, or deaths as the women who got dummy pills.

"This randomized trial casts further doubt on the role of folic acid and B vitamins in preventing cardiovascular disease, despite their effect in lowering homocysteine," Manson said in an interview. "It may take substantial lowering or it may be beneficial in people with extremely high levels of homocysteine, but this finding suggests folic acid and B vitamins should not be taken with the express intent of lowering cardiovascular disease."

A map created by Harvard biologist Marc Vidal and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, now a physicist at Northeastern University, plots diseases by the genes they have in common — something like the charts linking actors to one another (and ultimately to Kevin Bacon) based on the movies they appeared in together, as a story in today's New York Times describes it. They called it the "diseasome" in a paper they published last year.

Its concepts are changing the field of disease classification, the story says, including different kinds of cancer.

“In the not too distant future, we will think about these diseases based on the molecular pathways that are aberrant, rather than the anatomical origin of the tumor,” Dr. Todd Golub, director of the cancer program at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, told the Times.

Doctors can make the biggest difference in bringing lessons learned from palliative care in cancer to other fatal conditions, according to a prominent scientific journal's poll.

Last month the British Medical Journal asked its readers to choose one of six topics where they thought the most improvement in patient care could be made. Two authors had written about each one, including Dr. Jerry Avorn and Dr. William Shrank of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. He discussed avoiding medication problems in older people.

More than 4,000 readers responded with these choices:

Palliative care for all at the end of life: 38 percent
Combating drug-resistant infections in the developing world: 22 percent
Better care for the elderly with multiple health problems: 17
Improving chronic pain management: 12 percent
Reducing excessive drinking in young women: 8 percent
Helping to reduce adverse drug reactions in the elderly: 3 percent

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.

Brown University has created a center to study matter at its tiniest scale across fields from energy to medicine.

The Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation will focus on molecular devices, nanoparticles, and nanosystems. About 55 Brown faculty members will be affiliated with the institute, which will also collaborate with the Center for Nanophase Materials Science at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, General Motors, and the NanoBusiness Alliance.

The institute will formally open with a forum from May 5 through 7. Scheduled speakers include Yet-Ming Chiang and Phil Gschwend of MIT and Charles Lieber of Harvard.

Barbara J. Grosz (left) a professor of natural sciences in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has been appointed dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, succeeding Harvard President Drew Faust.

A computer scientist, Grosz has been interim dean of the Radcliffe Institute since July 1. Before that she was Radcliffe’s first dean of science, from 2001 to 2007, when Faust was dean of the Radcliffe Institute. Grosz joined the Harvard faculty in 1986.

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.

Women on hormone therapy had an increased risk of stroke whether they started taking the hormones close to menopause or at least 10 years later, a study reports, results that differ from the “timing hypothesis” suggested for estrogen and heart disease at different ages.

Harvard researchers led by Francine Grodstein write in the Archives of Internal Medicine that they found an overall increased risk for stroke of 39 percent for women taking estrogen and 27 percent for those taking estrogen plus progestin, compared to women who had never used hormones.

Overweight women who were physically active had a lower risk of developing heart disease than inactive overweight women, but exercise didn't completely offset the danger associated with obesity, a study found.

High body mass index and low physical activity have been separately linked to heart disease, but Boston researchers report in the Archives of Internal Medicine on how the two interacted as risk factors for heart disease among more than 38,000 healthy women, 45 and older, enrolled in the Women's Health Study.

Jack W. Szostak of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital has been honored by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences with its 2008 Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics. Szostak was recognized for his insights into the fundamental processes of life.

The Harvard School of Public Health's Nutrition Round Table bestowed its Healthy Cup Award on Dr. Kenneth Cooper, who introduced the word "aerobics" into Americans' vocabulary and helped spur a fitness movement.

Dr. Joseph Loscalzo of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital will accept the American Heart Association’s Paul Dudley White award at the Boston Heart Ball on May 10. He is being honored for his achievements in cardiovascular research.

Dr. JoAnn E. Manson of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital has received the Premio Benessere Stresa International Prize for Research and Innovation Related to WellBeing for her research related to women's health. The prize is sponsored by the Centro Benessere Stresa and the Giovanni Lorenzini Medical Foundation in Milan, Italy.

Harvard Medical School and Partners HealthCare closed a deal today that turns over to the hospital group the management of Harvard's international subsidiary.

Harvard Medical International will become Partners Harvard Medical International under the agreement, whose first step was disclosed in February. Harvard's more than 50 overseas programs in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, have added health system development to an original focus on medical education.

Partners is the parent company of Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham & Women's Hospital, and other Harvard-affiliated hospitals. The new international entity will still draw upon faculty and staff across Harvard University.

In two separate reports yesterday, two international teams led by Ram Sasisekharan of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology offered insights into the contamination of the blood-thinner heparin that has been linked to 81 deaths since November.

How the contaminant entered the manufacturing process is still a mystery, but the researchers have confirmed the identity of the chemical culprit, and explained why it eluded detection, and how it caused serious reactions in so many people. Patients typically need the drug to prevent blood clots while they undergo kidney dialysis or cardiac surgery. The main ingredient for heparin, which is manufactured in China, is derived from pig intestines.

In one paper, Sasisekharan’s team confirmed that the contaminant is a complex sugar known as oversulfated chondroitin sulfate, and showed why its chemical structure made it particularly difficult to detect. The report appears in Nature Biotechnology.

The second team showed the biological link between the contaminant and the symptoms reported in patients who received it. They demonstrated in laboratory samples and in pigs how the contaminant triggered an allergic-like immune response and lowered blood pressure. Patients who suffered bad reactions after receiving the tainted heparin had extremely low blood pressure, shortness of breath, nausea, and swelling of the skin and mucous membranes. This work is described in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Both teams included researchers from Momenta Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, which makes products that analyze complex mixtures. Sasisekharan receives consulting fees from Momenta.

Moving from paper to electronic medical records holds tremendous promise for greater efficiency and accuracy, but the new technology is not a cure for all that ails modern medicine, two Boston doctors write.

Dr. Pamela Hartzband and Dr. Jerome Groopman of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, writing in tomorrow's New England Journal of Medicine, warn that computers make it too easy for doctors to lose focus on the patients before them. Residents and doctors can cut and paste one another's notes into the record, sacrificing the benefit of fresh eyes looking at a patient and distilling what is most relevant. Lab test results can flood the record with no selectivity on what matters for the current problem.

But the most disturbing effect of digital records happens in the examination room, "to patients who, during their 15-minute clinic visit, watch their doctor stare at a computer screen," the authors write.

Not only is the patient put off, but the doctor is less able to think through a problem when not observing a patient. Groopman's book "How Doctors Think" analyzed the common errors in thinking that lead doctors to misdiagnose patients.

"Practicing 'thinking' medicine takes time, and electronic records will not change that," Hartzband and Groopman write in the journal. "We need to make this technology work for us, rather than allowing ourselves to work for it."

Two Massachusetts scientists will pick up another honor today in Toronto for their discovery of tiny RNA segments that can silence genes.

Victor Ambros (left) of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Gary Ruvkun of Harvard Medical School will share one of five 2008 Gairdner International Awards for their work with very short single-stranded RNA molecules. In 1993 they identified microRNAs that controlled the production of proteins involved in the development of worms.

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.

For his discovery that the human genome carries far more variation than previously thought, a Harvard researcher has won what is called the Korean equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

Charles Lee (left), 38, a researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Broad Institute, will receive the 2008 Ho-Am Prize in Medicine. The prize, established in 1990 by technology giant the Samsung Group, marks achievement by people of Korean ethnic origin in five disciplines. Each prize, to be awarded in Seoul in June, includes about $200,000.

Lee's 2004 work in human genetics overturned the idea that people had differences of less than 0.1 percent between their genomes. Instead, Lee's lab found hundreds of DNA stretches that were different, containing duplications or deletions of DNA segments. Extra or missing copies of DNA segments account for more than 18 percent of the human genome, it is now estimated.

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.

Where can doctors make the biggest difference in patient care?

The British Medical Journal wants to know.

The journal culled six choices from a list of 200 topics and is publishing two articles about each issue, one stating the problem and another proposing how to solve it. Dr. Jerry Avorn and Dr. William Shrank of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital write about medication problems in older people.

The nominees are:

-- Drug-resistant infections in poor countries
-- Multiple health problems in elderly people
-- Excessive drinking in young women
-- Management of chronic pain
-- Adverse drug reactions in elderly people
-- Palliative care beyond cancer

Readers can vote until April 16; results will be revealed April 25.

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 Susan Milligan, Globe Staff

Senator Edward M. Kennedy has tapped a former Massachusetts legislator and prominent health care activist to be his chief adviser on health reform, a move Kennedy's office said was aimed at developing a universal health care plan after the presidential election.

John McDonough, a former state House member, was a key player in crafting Massachusetts's mandatory health insurance plan. But McDonough said he will not necessarily advocate such a plan for the nation as a whole.