Monday, July 9, 2007

Today's Globe: nurse midlife, emotional stability, obscenities, bridging the gap, Eugene Bell, healthcare politics

A small but growing number of mid career professionals like former Verizon operations manager Bill Kerr (with patient Rashad Paulding) are abandoning the cubicle, the construction site, and even the boardroom in favor of the bedside.

Good news, folks! Some things actually get better with age, and I'm happy to say that emotional stability is one of them, Judy Foreman writes. It says so right in the authoritative Journal of Neuroscience.

Christopher Potts, a linguist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, wants to learn whether there are linguistic rules that would indicate when an obscenity is meant to offend, shock or be funny and when it's intended to express anger, surprise or fear.

Dr. Paige Church (with patient Ariel Estrada) was born with spina bifida, a dangerous birth malformation that required repeated surgeries throughout her childhood. She now runs the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit follow-up program at Floating Hospital for Children where she bridges the gap between families and physicians.

Also in Health/Science, are people radioactive and does the lycopene in tomatoes help protect against prostate cancer?

Years of meticulous research came to fruition for Eugene Bell (left) more than a quarter-century ago when he mixed human cells, collagen, and other ingredients to create a skin-like tissue that could be grafted onto severely injured patients, such as those who had been badly burned. He went on to join the faculty of MIT and found two biotechnology companies and most recently had been conducting stem cell research involving adult body cells. He died June 22 after suffering a heart attack in his Boston home. Dr. Bell was 88.

Health care is staking a claim to center stage on the national political and issue agenda for the first time since the great debate about the Clinton health reform plan in the early 1990s, Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, writes on the op-ed page.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 07:30 AM

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