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.

Imagine an itch so terrible it takes over your whole life. Or your brain.

Dr. Atul Gawande of Brigham and Women's Hospital ponders the mysteries of itch and other sensations, writing in the current New Yorker about pain, its perception, and what might be an entirely different order of sensation. He queries dermatologist Dr. Jeffrey Bernhard of University of Massachusetts Medical School and neurologist Dr. Anne Louise Oaklander of Massachusetts General Hospital about a puzzling case that nearly destroyed a woman's life.

"We now have the nerve map for itching, as we do for other sensations," Gawande writes. "But a deeper puzzle remains: how much of our sensations and experiences do nerves really explain?"

A world-renowned Cape Cod research institution will use a share of the state’s new life-sciences funding to help build a center for regenerative biology and medicine, the science behind the starfish’s ability to regrow its limbs.

The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole will work with the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth to study how organisms regenerate parts of their bodies and ways the mechanisms might be used to repair aging or injured tissues and organs. The center, also supported by federal grants and private philanthropy, will be built on the Woods Hole campus.

The two institutions are sharing $10 million with the Regional Technology Development Corp. of Cape Cod, whose mission is to translate scientific discoveries into biotechnology businesses.

Governor Deval Patrick signed the $1 billion life-sciences bill into law Monday.

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.

More isn’t necessarily better when it comes to medical care, a survey of Medicare patients shows.

Spending on healthcare varies widely across the United States, from $12,000 a year for Miami beneficiaries to $5,700 for comparable care in Minneapolis, previous studies have shown. But research led by Floyd J. Fowler of the University of Massachusetts-Boston shows that money spent on medical care didn’t necessarily match perceptions of the quality of that care.

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.

University of Massachusetts Medical School and its high-powered RNAi research team have lured a top Boston physician-scientist to head its academic and clinical neurology departments, the school announced today.

Dr. Robert H. Brown Jr. (left), who identified gene mutations linked to the neuromuscular disease ALS, is leaving Massachusetts General Hospital after 30 years to take on his new roles in Worcester. He has already been working with UMass scientists to develop therapies for neurodegenerative diseases based on RNA interference, a gene-silencing mechanism discovered by UMass researcher and Nobel laureate Craig C. Mello.

Brown called Mello remarkable for his commitment to using basic science in the form of RNAi research to ameliorate human suffering.

"We do basic lab work on the genetics of these diseases," Brown said in an interview. "The question is, after 30 years and five or six genes, can we now find new ways to treat the problems they present?"

Brown, a physician and a scientist, founded the Day Neuromuscular Laboratory and also directs the Muscular Dystrophy Association Clinic at Mass. General and is a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. He will chair neurology at UMass Medical School and its clinical partner, UMass Memorial Medical Center, when he arrives in October.

He holds degrees from from Amherst College, Harvard Medical School, and Oxford University, where he received a doctorate in neurophysiology.

Dr. Bruce S. Auerbach (left), chief of emergency and ambulatory services at Sturdy Memorial Hospital in Attleboro, was elected president of the Massachusetts Medical Society at its annual meeting today in Boston. He succeeds Shrewsbury gynecologist Dr. B. Dale Magee.

Dr. Mario E. Motta, cardiologist at North Shore Cardiovascular Associates in Salem was chosen president-elect. Dr. Alice A. Tolbert Coombs, a critical care specialist at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, was elected vice president. Dr. Richard V. Aghababian, associate dean of continuing medical education at University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, is secretary-treasurer.

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.

Three Massachusetts reseachers have won grants to develop an HIV vaccine for children. The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation has awarded five grants amounting to a total of $1 million. The winners include Dr. Marylyn Addo of Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Dan Barouch of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Dr. Shan Lu of the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Kim Lewis, director of the Antimicrobial Center at Northeastern University, has won a four-year, $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to investigate the genetics of multidrug tolerance in bacteria.

Tyler E. Jacks, director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, has been named president-elect of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Dr. Shawn Tsuda, a fellow in minimally invasive surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, took top honors at the Top Gun Laparoscopic Skills Shoot-Out during the annual meeting of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons earlier this month in Philadelphia.To win, he had to show his suturing skill, depth perception, and instrument accuracy.

Michael V. Sack, president and CEO of Hallmark Health, was named a Grassroots Champion by the American Hospital Association. Hallmark Health is a healthcare system in Boston's northern suburbs.

A new health-reporting service designed to reach immigrants and non-English speakers was launched today by the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

The New England Ethnic Newswire will be free for ethnic media outlets in New England. Plans call for stories to be translated into English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, or Haitian Creole. Its goal is to transmit health information to underserved populations, according to UMass.

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.

Two Massachusetts scientists are being honored for their work with tiny stretches of RNA that can silence genes.

Victor Ambros (left) of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Gary Ruvkun of Harvard Medical School, along with David Baulcombe of the University of Cambridge in England, will share one of nine Franklin Institute Awards.

The institute, which prides itself on anticipating Nobel Prize recognition in science, singled out these three researchers for their discovery in 1993 that small strands of RNA called microRNAs could turn off genes that produce proteins inside cells.

Craig Mello, also of UMass, and Andrew Fire, then of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in medicine for their discovery of RNA interference through gene silencing by double-stranded RNA. Their landmark paper was published in 1998. On the day the prize was announced, Mello said work by Ambros and others with microRNAs also deserved a prize, perhaps the Nobel in chemistry.

By 1999 Ambros, Ruvkun, and Baulcombe had expanded their earlier work on microRNAs in worms and plants to other animals, including humans, showing the mechanism's importance throughout life.

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

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

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

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

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

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

The state's medical school and a veterans' health center are joining forces.

The University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and the Bedford Veterans Administration Medical Center will announce an academic affiliation tomorrow morning at an 11 a.m. news conference at the Bedford facility.

The two institutions said they plan to work together on patient care, education, and research.

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

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

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

In a sign that Massachusetts' healthcare initiative is succeeding, use of the "free care pool," the fund that pays for hospital care for the uninsured, dropped by 16 percent in the first year of the effort to insure most residents, according to new state figures.

Congress is edging closer to allowing generic versions of advanced biologic drugs, which are made from living organisms instead of chemicals, a development that would have a major impact on consumers as well as on Massachusetts biotechnology companies.

A Massachusetts General Hospital neurologist is studying whether guided meditation administered in the virtual world of Second Life can effectively reduce stress.

A Chestnut Hill synagogue honored a Pittsburgh man who donated a kidney to save the life of Albert Sherman, vice chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

The number of babies with cystic fibrosis is falling in Massachusetts, new research shows, and among those babies who do have the inherited disorder, significantly fewer have the genetic defect linked to its most severe form.

Infants in Massachusetts have been tested for cystic fibrosis since 1999 by the New England Newborn Screening Program. In a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, three researchers from the program hypothesize that the decrease they observed may be related to testing of adults to see if they carry the genetic defect associated with cystic fibrosis, recommended since 2001.

Adults who test positive may be less likely to have biological children, or more likely to terminate pregnancies.

“On average we’re talking about 25 to 30 babies in the first four years with cystic fibrosis and in the last 4 years we’re talking about around 15,” Anne Marie Comeau, deputy director of the screening program, said in an interview. The program operates under the University of Massachusetts at the State Laboratory Institute in Jamaica Plain. “That’s pretty impressive."

The University of Massachusetts has formed a search committee to find a new medical school chancellor.

UMass trustee Philip Johnston, a former state legislator and Dukakis administration cabinet secretary, and Nobel laureate Craig C. Mello of the medical school will lead the 18-member group. They will identify finalists to succeed Dr. Aaron Lazare, who had been both dean and chancellor from 1991 until stepping down last March.

Dr. Michael Collins has been interim chancellor at the state's medical school since May, when he was also named senior vice president for health sciences for the five-campus UMass system. Before coming to the medical school he had been chancellor of UMass-Boston.

Collins's appointment was part of a larger university restructuring by university president Jack Wilson, who was criticized for making chancellor-level changes without nationwide searches, including a plan to add the Amherst chancellorship to his role as president.

UMass spokesman Robert Connolly said the medical school search would be national and comprehensive.

The University of Massachusetts at Boston and the Harvard School of Public Health will create a research center devoted to health and healthcare disparities, the institutions said today.

A five-year, $7.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities will fund the HORIZON Center, named for its goal of providing healthy options, research, interventions, and community organizing, the schools said. The center will work with the Cherishing our Hearts and Souls Coalition, a group that has collaborated with the Harvard School of Public Health on efforts to close health gaps in Roxbury, which has the youngest, poorest, least educated, and least employed people among Boston's neighborhoods, the school said.

Boston’s racial and ethnic groups have different risks of illnesses and death. Black residents, for example, have higher rates of preterm births, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, hospitalization, cancer mortality, and premature death, according to the Boston Public Health Commission.

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 new ABC courtroom drama is drawing fire from a physicians’ organization and local pediatricians over its verdict on vaccines and autism.

The American Academy of Pediatrics is calling for ABC to pull Thursday night’s debut of “Eli Stone," a courtroom drama. In the episode, the main character wins a case after arguing that a childhood vaccine containing a mercury-based preservative caused the defendent to develop autism.

“A television show that perpetuates the myth that vaccines cause autism is the height of reckless irresponsibility on the part of ABC and its parent company, The Walt Disney Co.,” AAP president Dr. Renee R. Jenkins said in a statement. “If parents watch this program and choose to deny their children immunizations, ABC will share in the responsibility for the suffering and deaths that occur as a result.”

Dr. Robin Adair, assistant professor of pediatrics at University of Massachusetts Medical School, supports the academy’s position.

“I agree with the concern that the show might frighten people away from vaccinating their children due to a risk that I think is fairly conclusively shown not to exist,” she said in an interview. “Yes, it’s put out there as entertainment, but these sorts of things can be influential.”

The link between the additive thimerosal and autism has been promoted by parents and advocacy groups despite repeated research studies finding no basis for the belief. The most recent study came earlier this month from the California Department of Public Health, which found that after thimerosal had been removed from vaccines, autism diagnoses continued to rise.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci (left), director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will deliver the commencement address to graduates of the University of Massachusetts Worcester School of Medicine, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and Graduate School of Nursing on June 1, UMass said. He will receive an honorary degree from the school, as will Margaret H. Marshall, chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and Dr. Leonard J. Morse, Worcester commissioner of public health.

Alejandro P. Heuck, a biochemist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has received a four-year, $308,000 grant from the American Heart Association to develop molecular probes that can measure cholesterol levels in the membranes of individual cells, UMass said. These probes will be designed to help detect how well cholesterol-lowering drugs work and to diagnoses diseases such as atherosclerosis and Alzheimer's.

Patients who are cared for by specialists in hospital-based medicine -- called hospitalists -- have slightly shorter hospital stays without higher rates of death or readmission, a group of Massachusetts doctors reports.

A study appearing in tomorrow’s New England Journal of Medicine found that, on average, the hospitalists’ patients spent almost half a day less in the hospital than the patients cared for by general internists and family physicians. The cost of their stay was about the same, suggesting that tests and treatments were compressed into the shorter amount of time.

“Even though the differences in length of stay we observed may on first blush appear as small, if you multiply those by the many thousands of admissions to hospitalist care each year, the effect can really be quite large,” lead author Dr. Peter Lindenauer of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield said in an interview. “This benefit did not come at the expense of increased mortality or a higher readmission rate so it didn’t seem to be a tradeoff” in quality of care.

By Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Higher cancer rates among ethnic and racial minority groups cannot be attacked without increasing their representation in clinical trials, community health workers and health care providers heard today.

"The solution is to build community-academic partnerships," Dr. Claudia Baquet, director of the University of Maryland Comprehensive Center for Health Disparities, told about 100 people at a conference at the University of Massachusetts - Boston also sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health and community outreach organizations. "Notice I said 'community' first."

By Scott Allen, Globe Staff

The babies will be studied from the time they are in their mothers' wombs through their 21st birthdays in hopes of discovering the earliest signs of diseases that disable and kill Americans by the million. The air they breath, the grass they play on, the water they drink -- all of it will be carefully measured for signs of contamination, and their family histories and genetic composition mined for the smallest defects.

The National Children's Study, the most ambitious study of children's health ever undertaken, took a big step toward reality today with the naming of 22 centers, including the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, that will carry out the decades of meticulous research.

Under an initial $16.24 million, five-year federal grant, the state medical school will recruit 1,000 Worcester County women willing to let their children's growth and development be tracked as part of the 100,000-child national study that aims to do for children's health what the famous Framingham Heart Study did for the understanding of heart disease.

"This is transformational ... We are talking about 30 years of studies," said Dr. Marianne Felice, chair of pediatrics at UMass, who spearheaded efforts to win the right to run the central Massachusetts branch of the study. "This is like the Framingham Heart Study for children, but better, longer and in more detail."

University of Massachusetts Medical School has hired two leading RNA researchers to join a group best known for Nobel Prize winner Craig C. Mello.

Victor R. Ambros (far left), who discovered molecules called microRNAs that are important in gene regulation, is leaving Dartmouth Medical School for UMass, and Melissa J. Moore, noted for her work with gene splicing and messenger RNA, is coming from Brandeis University.

"Wow, they got the A Team," Phillip A. Sharp, an MIT Nobel laureate, said in an interview today. Moore previously worked in his lab and Ambros worked in the lab next door.

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

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

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

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has taken over the cardiothoracic surgery program at St. Vincent Hospital previously run by Tufts-New England Medical Center and is starting a transplant referral program at the Worcester hospital, the hospitals said.

BIDMC physicians already staff the 348-bed medical center's emergency and radiation oncology departments. The change in cardiothoracic surgery took place July 1, when Dr. Robert M. Bojar, a surgeon based at St. Vincent, switched from Tufts-NEMC to BIDMC. Bojar and Dr. David C. Liu, another BIDMC surgeon, now operate in Worcester.

Tufts-NEMC spokeswoman Brooke Tyson Hynes said yesterday the cardiothoracic surgery change came about because of BIDMC's new surgical residency program at St. Vincent. On July 1, seven surgical residents began the first BIDMC rotations at the Worcester hospital, a year after University of Massachusetts Medical School and its clinical partner, UMass Memorial Medical Center, ended their surgical residency programs at St. Vincent.

Two Massachusetts scientists are in the 2007 class of the W.M. Keck Foundation's Distinguished Young Scholars in Medical Research.

The Los Angeles philanthropy awards grants of up to $1 million each to five junior faculty members in the United States. Institutions make nominations by invitation only.

Amy Wagers (right) of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Joslin Diabetes Center and Harvard Medical School will study how to slow down or reverse the natural process of aging, which has potential implications for treating such age-related diseases as diabetes, immune deficiencies, muscle weakness and cancer, the foundation said.

Job Dekker (left) of University of Massachusetts Medical School will study how chromosomes are regulated by comparing cancer cells to normal cells, which may uncover defects that cause malignancy, potentially leading to advances in treating cancer, the foundation said.

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.

Jennifer Davis Carey (left), who served in four governors' adminstrations, will be leaving Beacon Hill to become director of training and education at University of Massachusetts Medical School's Commonwealth Medicine, the school announced today.

She had been secretary for the Executive Office of Elder Affairs since 2003. Governor Deval Patrick has asked cabinet secretaries to send him letters for reappointment, but she said she did not submit one.

"This is a wonderful administration with wonderful people and Governor Patrick is extraordinary, but this is a tremendous opportunity," she said in an interview. "UMass is an extraordinary institution and Commonwealth Medicine is on the cutting edge, so taking their academic assets and putting them together with my educational background and what I learned in public policy really allows me to put these passions together."

Commonwealth Medicine is best known for overseeing the health system for 10,000 inmates in the custody of the Department of Correction, but it also carries out research and public health initiatives.

"Commonwealth Medicine is like an action tank as opposed to just a think tank," she said. "They do more than just think."

Carey’s experience in state government began when Paul Cellucci was governor; she stayed when Jane M. Swift succeeded him and was promoted during the Mitt Romney administration. From 1999 through 2003 she was director of the Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation.

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

About 100 faculty and staff were filing out of a UMass Medical School program to meet their new interim chancellor today when a confrontation erupted between physiology professor John Walsh and the school's deputy chancellor Richard Stanton.

Walsh objected to the lack of a competitive nationwide search for a
chancellor to succeed Dr. Aaron Lazare, who stepped down as medical school chancellor in March because of a heart arrhythmia.

The selection of Dr. Michael F. Collins, who had been chancellor of UMass-Boston, was one of the moves UMass president Jack M. Wilson disclosed on Tuesday to tie the university's five campuses closely together. He said naming a permanent medical school chancellor would be evaluated next year.

Walsh said in an interview that the appointment of Collins "smacks of the same cronyism that put Billy Bulger in charge of the university, that put Marty Meehan in at Lowell and now we have an executive from Boston taking over without any input from faculty or anyone else."

He then approached Wilson, who told Walsh interim appointments do not require search committees; Wilson cited Harvard's Derek Bok as an example of someone called upon to step in on short notice. Bok has been acting president since the departure of Lawrence Summers last year. Drew Gilpin Faust takes over as president in July.

Stanton got in the middle while Walsh and Wilson spoke.

"You are offensive as a faculty member," he told Walsh. "Your tenure has outlived your usefulness."

Relatively few women are department heads or full professors at the four medical schools in Massachusetts. And Dr. Karen Antman of the Boston University School of Medicine is the only female dean.

This lack of women in leadership roles in academic medicine is no longer a pipeline problem, now that medical schools admit equal numbers of men and women, says Dr. Linda Pololi of Brandeis University, who is leading a study of the issue.

The answer to women's persistent under-representation must lie elsewhere, she said in a recent interview. "Something in the system impedes their progress toward taking leadership positions."

Here are the percentages of women in leadership positions at Massachusetts medical schools and how they compare with all 125 medical schools nationwide, according to 2005 data from the Association of American Medical Colleges provided by Pololi:

Deans
BU 100%
Harvard 0%
Tufts 0%
UMass 0%
US 13%

Chairs of clinical science departments
BU 11%
Harvard 10%
Tufts 8%
UMass 7%
US 8%

Chairs of basic science departments
BU 0%
Harvard 33%
Tufts 29%
UMass 0%
US 13%

Full professors
BU 19%
Harvard 12%
Tufts 11%
UMass 19%
US 14%

Nobel laureate Craig C. Mello of University of Massachusetts Medical School (left) is taking his plea for more science funding to Capitol Hill, along with four other Americans who swept the 2006 science Nobel prizes.

Mello, who won the 2006 prize in medicine or physiology with Stanford’s Andrew Z. Fire for their discovery of gene silencing known as RNA interference, was invited to speak this afternoon at a hearing of the Senate subcommittee on science, technology and innovation. Roger D. Kornberg (chemistry) and John C. Mather and George F. Smoot (joint winners in physics) were also on the agenda.

"We need a call to arms, a call to fund science broadly in this country," a transcript of Mello’s prepared testimony said. "This isn’t science for the sake of science, but science for the sake of medical advances and lives to be saved."

By James Vaznis, Globe Staff

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst will bring back its undergraduate degree in public health sciences this fall.

The degree should help meet a growing demand for public health workers to respond to pandemics, bio-terrorism, and other public health crisis. The university dropped the degree in 1989 to focus on its graduate programs in public health.

The state Board of Higher Education is expected to approve the program at its meeting next week. UMass already has started to admit students.

Brandeis University is the only other Massachusetts college that offers an undergraduate major in public health, according to the state board.

At at time when federal funding for scientific research is harder to come by, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is opening up a competition today to select 50 new investigators who will share $600 million for biomedical research.

For the first time scientists can apply directly to become HHMI investigators rather than needing their institutions to nominate them.

The researchers must belong to eligible institutions. In Massachusetts, 10 qualify: Boston Biomedical Research Institute, Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis University, Harvard Medical School and associated hospitals, Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory, MIT, Tufts University School of Medicine, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Slate's Book Club features a conversation between Dr. Jerome Groopman, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of "How Doctors Think," and Dr. Darshak Sanghavi, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who met Groopman when he was a fellow at Children's Hospital Boston.

"Algorithms and treatment guidelines are based on prototypes," Groopman writes. "They are not substitutes for individual thinking. And they break down when cases are atypical or complex."

Sanghavi, an occasional contributor to the Globe, summarizes their different points of view:

"This ultimately returns to our disagreement about standardizing medical care," he writes. "You feel it often constricts good medical practice; I think we don't have enough of it."

Dr. Terence R. Flotte, a pediatrician and gene therapy researcher from the University of Florida, has been named the new dean and deputy executive chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Dr. Terence R. Flotte

Currently the chair of pediatrics at the University of Florida School of Medicine in Gainesville, Flotte, 45, will succeed Dr. Aaron Lazare, 71, on May 15. Last year Lazare stepped back from the dual role of dean and chancellor of UMass Medical School, remaining chancellor until last month, when for health reasons he began a one-year sabbatical. He will then return to teaching psychology.

Flotte focuses his research on genetic therapies and cystic fibrosis in particular. He plans to continue to conduct research, see patients and teach.

Harvard Medical School, is again the top medical school in the United States, according to the annual rankings compiled by U.S. News & World Report. Harvard has led the rankings since 1990, when they began.

Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis and University of California -- San Francisco followed in the top five.

Boston University ranked 34th, Tufts University was 47th and the University of Massachusetts came in 49th out of 125 U.S. medical schools.

The standings were based on eight measures, including surveys of medical school deans and residency program directors, as well as 2006 research funding from the National Institutes of Health. Harvard received $1.17 billion from NIH that year, BU pulled in $170 million, UMass had $118 million and Tufts drew $61 million, according to U.S. News.

UMass Medical School's primary care education program ranked 11th. The University of Washington led that category.

Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School are exploring a way to wipe out viruses by luring them to their destruction, like mice to mousetraps.

The mousetraps in this case are red blood cells. If a virus ends up inside a red blood cell, there are no genes it can hijack to replicate itself.

"It occurred to us that if a virus bound to a red blood cell, that was a dead end," Dr. Robert W. Finberg says in a story in today's New York Times.

(David L. Ryan Globe staff photo)
Boston University medical students Miriam Shiferaw (left) and Nawal Momani check letters together to find out where they have been accepted for their residency, during the Match Day at BU Medical School in Boston.

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Now they know.

Graduating medical students ripped open envelopes at noon today that contained their futures. Known as "Match Day," today was the day 15,206 medical school seniors across the country learned where they will be going and what specialty they'll embark on once they get there.

Nationally, 94 percent of students trained in the United States got their first choices, according to the National Resident Matching Program, which has coordinated the preferences of medical students with residency programs since 1952.

Massachusetts' four medical schools -- Boston University School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Tufts University School of Medicine and University of Massachusetts Medical School -- took part in the ritual. They did not all have data today on who's going where.

Dr. Aaron Lazare stepped down as chancellor and dean of University of Massachusetts Medical School today because he has developed a cardiac arrhythmia, the medical school announced.

Dr. Aaron Lazare

Lazare, 71, has headed the state's medical school since 1991, presiding over a complicated merger between its hospital and the private Memorial Health Care that was completed in 1998, as well as an expansion of research reflected in a $100 million laboratory building that bears his name.

"This is a bittersweet moment for me," Lazare said in a memo sent to faculty, staff and students this morning. "I have had an extraordinary vantage point as this institution has grown into a role as a health sciences campus of international distinction. To say that my work over the years has been professionally and personally rewarding is an utter understatement: It has been a privilege."

Jessica Wang, a second-year student at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, has won the 9th Annual Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Health Achievement Award.

The American Medical Student Association and the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association honored Wang for introducing issues that affect LGBT patients into the medical school curriculum and for leading QMass, a UMMS student organization dedicated to supporting and promoting LGBT issues.

Jessica Wang

Dr. Gary S. Moak, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, next month will become president of the 2,000-member American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, the organization said.

Dr. Gary S. Moak

He is director of the Moak Center for Healthy Aging, a geriatric psychiatry group practice in Westborough.

Listening more and talking less really does make a difference, not only for intensive care patients but also for their loved ones.

A UMass Memorial Medical Center physician lauds as "groundbreaking" a French study appearing in tomorrow’s New England Journal of Medicine that looks at how ICU doctors communicate with families.

Previous studies have shown that even desperately ill people do better when the goals of treatment, whether that means aggressive care or comfort measures only, are well explained and understood. But no one had looked at how communication affects relatives of patients dying in the ICU.

"The French study is groundbreaking because it shows if we spend a little bit more time, mostly listening to patients and their families, the well-being of survivors of patients who die is going to be better," Dr. Craig M. Lilly of UMass Memorial said in an interview. He comments in a New England Journal editorial, "The Healing Power of Listening in the ICU."

The Nobel scientist with rock star looks got the big brass sound of the UMass-Amherst marching band he asked for at a bash in Worcester Friday night.

Gov. Deval L. Patrick said "You throw a heckuva party" after he strode through the crowd and greeted UMass Medical School's Craig C. Mello, who shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Stanford's Andrew Z. Fire. They discovered RNA interference, a way to silence genes that has revolutionized science and holds hope for saving lives.