Flu activity continues to be widespread in Massachusetts, public health officials said today in a weekly report drawn from the number of people visiting their doctors with fever, cough, and sore throats.

Patients are not routinely tested to see if they have swine flu, or H1N1, but because there are so many more cases than usual this early in the winter flu season, most illnesses are assumed to be caused by the H1N1 virus. About 5 percent of visits to doctors represent flu-like illnesses, the state said, well above peak levels in previous years.

A growing number of flu cases among patients has prompted Massachusetts General Hospital to change its policy for visitors. Last week the hospital barred children and teenagers from its obstetrics unit because children are both more likely to catch and transmit the flu.

As of Monday, children 18 and under are asked not to come to any part of the hospital unless they are patients, associate chief nurse Debra Burke said today. She also urged people with flu symptoms and anyone who has been around someone sick with the flu to stay away, again unless they are patients.

"Before you have symptoms of flu, you could have the flu and be shedding the virus for up to two days," she said. "We're just asking people to be really careful."

Just over half of the life scientists doing research at American universities have some kind of relationship with pharmaceutical or biotech companies, Boston researchers report. But the proportion of researchers whose work was funded directly by industry appears to be falling.

Writing in the current issue of Health Affairs, a group from the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Health Policy reports that 53 percent of academic scientists said they had ties to industry, mostly serving as consultants, paid speakers, or scientific advisory board members. Faculty members whose research studies were paid for by industry dropped to 20 percent from 28 percent in 1995, the last time the team polled a similar sample of academic researchers.

"This is the first time we have noticed a decline in industry funding," co-author Eric Campbell said in an interview.

The authors point to a number of forces that might be behind the drop, including a doubling of federal research funds from the National Institutes of Health between 1995 and 2007, when the latest survey was done, and flat research spending by companies during that period.

The survey of more than 2,000 researchers also found that industry funding was concentrated among the most senior and productive faculty members, which the authors said could potentially limit the pool of academic scientists without industry ties available to advise such bodies as the Food and Drug Administration, the NIH, or the Institute of Medicine.

"Physician relationships with industry are ubiquitous, in medical education, in research, and in patient care," Campbell said. "It's everywhere."

Five members of a national physicians organization led about 30 people in a rally outside Massachusetts General Hospital today protesting the use of live animals in a training program for trauma treatment.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine said it targeted Mass. General because the hospital uses live, anesthetized sheep to teach trainees how to insert tubes and needles into the animals’ chests or cut into their throats. The animals are later killed, according to the group, a nonprofit organization that advocates preventive medicine and ethical research practices.

The hospital defended its use of animals in Advanced Trauma Life Support training.

"We have long been committed to conducting all activities according to the highest standards of quality, safety and excellence," the hospital said in a statement emailed to the Globe. "This commitment includes delivering the highest quality care to laboratory animals that are used for research and education purposes. The animals are anesthetized and treated in the most humane manner possible. We take this responsibility very seriously."

Most hospitals, including Boston Medical Center, use human patient simulators to teach these skills, the physicians' group said. Ten out of 207 trauma hospitals in the United States and Canada use live animals, Dallas cardiologist Dr. John Pippin said outside Mass. General today. Mass. General has simulators but also uses sheep, the hospital confirmed.

"Since June, five programs have ended the use of animals and two more will do so as soon as they get simulators," he said. "This is disappearing from the landscape, but Mass. General is lagging behind."

By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff

Harvard researchers have created a strip of pulsing heart muscle from mouse embryonic stem cells, a step toward the eventual goal of growing replacement parts for hearts damaged by cardiovascular disease.

The new work, to be published in the journal Science tomorrow, begins to confront what will be a major frontier for stem cell biology: translating recent basic science advances to meet the promise of regenerative medicine, by finding ways to make such cells functional and potentially useful for therapies.

"I think over the last five years or so, we’ve made great progress in being able to guide stem cells into whatever cell type we want -- in this case the heart," said Dr. Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research. The new work "has begun to think about how to assemble these types of cardiac cells into a 3-D fashion, for future use within a heart. It’s a long way from that right now ... but it’s a first baby step toward that goal."

Thirteen Massachusetts researchers and clinicians have been elected to the Institute of Medicine, a prestigious national body that makes recommendations on health and health-care policy.

The institute's 65 new members include:

Amy N. Finkelstein, professor of economics, MIT
Alfred L. Goldberg, professor of cell biology, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Sue J. Goldie, professor of public health, and director, Center for Health Decision Science, Harvard School of Public Health
Dr. Daniel A. Haber, professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, and director, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center
Tyler E. Jacks, professor of biology, and director, David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, MIT
Dr. Ichiro Kawachi, professor and chair, department of society, human development, and health, Harvard School of Public Health
Dr. Isaac S. Kohane, professor of pediatrics and health sciences and technology, Harvard Medical School; and chair, informatics program, Children's Hospital Boston
Dr. Joan Y. Reede, dean for diversity and community partnership and associate professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School
Gary Ruvkun, professor of genetics, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital
Dr. Clifford B. Saper, professor of neurology and neuroscience, Harvard Medical School, and professor and head, department of neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Dr. Megan Sykes, associate director, Transplantation Biology Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, and professor of surgery and professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Bruce D. Walker, director, Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Harvard University
Dr. Ralph Weissleder, professor of systems biology and radiology, Harvard Medical School, and director, Center for Systems Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital

Boston researchers will play a leading role in a new federal initiative focusing on stem cell biology and regenerative therapies.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute today announced $170 million in grants over seven years to 18 teams of researchers working in nine hubs across the country. The new NHLBI Progenitor Cell Biology Consortium includes Dr. George Daley of Children's Hospital Boston and Dr. Kenneth Chien and Dr. David Scadden of Massachusetts General Hospital.

Progenitor cells, unlike stem cells that can renew themselves indefinitely, can divide only a limited number of times and can become only certain kinds of cells. The hope is that stem and progenitor cells can be harnessed to grow new cells that could replace or repair cells damaged by heart, lung, and blood diseases.

Daley and Chien will head the hub studying ways to use induced pluripotent stem cells in regenerative therapy for heart and blood disorders.

Scadden and Dr. Jay Schneider of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas will lead efforts studying progenitor cell types in the heart and lung and exploring how the microenvironment within the heart, lung, and bone marrow determines what progenitor cells do.

By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff

Jack W. Szostak, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, is one of three winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009. He will share the $1.4 million prize with Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, and Carol W. Greider of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The three are being honored for discovering a mechanism that protects the genome from degrading, research that has had an impact on aging and cancer research. The trio discovered that the caps of chromosomes -- called telomeres -- protect DNA, and that an enzyme called telomerase builds the caps.

When Szostak arrived at his Mass. General laboratory this morning, colleagues had hung photocopies around the lab of his landmark 1982 journal article on telomeres, "Cloning Yeast Telomeres on Linear Plasmid Vectors," with the words "Congrats Jack!" scrawled over it. Balloons and streamers decorated the lab.

Szostak was later welcomed to a conference room with a long standing ovation. Smiling and shaking his head in what seemed like overwhelmed disbelief, he called the award "delightful" and said he was awakened by the call from the Nobel committee before 5 a.m.

"This is the highest scientific honor," Szostak said. "It's great to receive that kind of recognition."

In a press release early this morning, The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet said the scientists were honored for discoveries that "have added a new dimension to our understanding of the cell, shed light on disease mechanisms, and stimulated the development of potential new therapies."

Massachusetts has made a strong showing in a $348 million federal grant program that encourages biomedical researchers to engage in high-risk projects with the potential to accelerate the translation of research discoveries into treatments.

Eleven of 42 Transformational R01 grants are flowing to scientists in the state and 12 of 55 New Innovator award winners are based here. One of 18 Pioneer Award recipients is from Massachusetts. All three programs from the National Institutes of Health are designed to spur exploration that may have been deemed too risky in past rounds.

Planning for the worst might not be the best when it comes to flu pandemics, an MIT doctoral student argues on the eve of a renewed swine flu outbreak expected in the fall.

Writing in today's British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi of MIT's program in history; anthropology; and science, technology and society, says that fears of a public health disaster on the order of the 1918 flu pandemic may do more harm than good when dealing with a different kind of threat.

If public health messages about the dangers of flu are ignored as alarmist, Doshi says, they may erode people's trust and make important warnings go unheeded. And if fears about the virus send unprecedented numbers of patients to seek flu tests, that could overwhelm the health care system. To complicate matters even more, the perceived prevalence of flu could be skewed because many people who wouldn't ordinarily get tested for seasonal flu would now be showing up.

"Predictions about pandemic flu were based on a disaster scenario," Doshi said in an interview. "The H1N1 outbreak shows just how wrong predictions can be."

The chief of general medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital is leaving to become head of a Boston non-profit organization that works to help people make health care choices.

Dr. Michael J. Barry is the new president of the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, the group said today. Barry succeeds Floyd J. Fowler, who was president for seven years.

Barry has been involved with the foundation since its inception in 1989. He led one of its early pilot projects at Mass. General to help patients understand their conditions and treatment choices. The program, now part of primary care practices at the hospital, uses videos and other audio-visual aids to explain options.