Monday, November 12, 2007

Long-term beta carotene use may help aging brains, study suggests

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Older men in good health who took beta carotene for about 18 years had better memory skills than similar men who took a placebo for the same length of time, a Harvard study shows.

The antioxidant, found in carrots, showed no benefit when taken for only three years, pointing to long duration as a critical factor in possibly slowing cognitive decline, which is a strong predictor of dementia.

The improvement was modest: Brain aging was delayed by about a year in men who took beta carotene long-term, author Francine Grodstein of Brigham and Women’s Hospital said in an interview. The study appears in today’s Archives of Internal Medicine.

She cautioned that it was too soon to recommend that men take beta carotene supplements. Beta carotene also has risks: Previous research has connected beta carotene to increased rates of lung cancer in smokers.

“Even though the changes that we saw are relatively modest, it is known that even modest changes in your memory can have a pretty big impact on the risk of dementia over the long term,” Grodstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said. It's the first study, she added, to find something that may help healthy people's memory.

The study followed about 6,000 men enrolled in the Physicians’ Health Study II over two time periods. They were given either 50 milligram pills of beta carotene or a placebo every other day. The first group participated for an average of 18 years and the second group for up to three years. They took tests of memory over the phone.

There was no improvement in the men who took beta carotene for the shorter time. The men who were on long-term beta carotene treatment did better, showing delays in cognitive aging of one to one and a half years, the study says.

In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Kristine Yaffe of the University of California, San Francisco, says it's plausible that long-term treatment may be necessary to have an effect on a disease that takes a long time to develop. But she also suggests there may be other interpretations of the results. In particular, she notes that the study doesn’t consider whether the men who took beta carotene for 18 years, staying in the study until it's completion, might be somehow different from men who did not continue to participate in the trial.

“For the clinician, there is no convincing justification to recommend the use of antioxidant dietary supplements to maintain cognitive performance in cognitively normal adults or in those with mild cognitive impairment,” she writes.

Grodstein said being conservative is appropriate.

“We don’t want to tell people to run out and start taking it immediately,” she said. “If we keep doing the research and keep working at it, it should give people hope we are going to be able to find something to help them keep their memory.”

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 05:01 PM

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Friday, November 9, 2007

Open access, open debate

Making scientific articles free and available to all is only fair to the taxpayers who support research and the developing countries who need it, a Nobel laureate at the forefront of the open-access movement said at a forum today, but the editor of a prestigious journal likened that approach to vanity publishing.

Dr. Harold Varmus, head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and former director of the National Institutes of Health, and Emilie Marcus, executive editor of Cell Press, took opposing positions at a conference on scientific publishing organized by graduate students at Harvard Medical School.

"The public pays a lot for the research that's published in this country," said Varmus, the keynote speaker. He shared the 1989 Nobel in medicine for his work with genes that cause cancer. "Why should they have to pay for it twice to see the results?"

During a later panel discussion, Marcus countered that having scientists pay journals to publish their work, which is the way open-access journals offset costs traditionally borne by subscribers, ignores the value that journals and editors bring.

"When journals derive money from readership, the pressure is on the journal to provide value important to the people who read it. I as editor focus on creating a journal you as readers want to read," she said. "The philosophy of publishing with the author paying can turn publishing into a vanity publishing model."

In opening remarks, Dr. Steven Hyman, provost of Harvard University, reminded the mostly young crowd of about 120 that when he was a student, he had to scramble to feed nickels into Xerox machines to copy papers from bound volumes of journals in the stacks of Countway Library.

Now scientists have the opportunity to make their work freely and immediately available online, with the same peer-review process in place, Varmus said. They pay a fee of up to $3,000 for publication in journals of the Public Library of Science.

Varmus also hopes for an encyclopedic and timely repository of all research, whatever journal publishes it originally, so people can search for all sorts of information without having to pay for it -- a concern for poorer nations around the world. PubMed Central was formed in 1999 with that idea in mind when Varmus was near the end of his tenure at NIH, but with only 5 percent of NIH-funded researchers contributing to it, and only several months after publication, the repository falls short of that goal, he said.

Marcus said articles published by Cell's parent company, Elsevier, are deposited on behalf of all NIH-funded authors into PubMed Central 12 months after publication at no charge.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 07:24 PM

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Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Women at the top, families in training

Dr. Nancy Andrews, who earlier this year left Harvard Medical School to become the first female dean of the Duke University School of Medicine, asks why it’s still big news when a woman takes the top post in academic medicine.

Writing in tomorrow’s New England Journal of Medicine, she answers her own question. Only 14 of 124 US medical school deans are women, and the pipeline for leadership at the department chair level is almost empty, despite similar numbers of men and women graduating from medical school.

“If institutions are to accelerate the emergence of more female deans, then they will need to consider women who have not stepped on every rung of the traditional academic career ladder,” she writes.

The article that follows Andrews’ essay takes a look earlier in medical careers, focusing on family leave policies for male and female doctors during their residency programs.

Dr. Reshma Jagsi of the University of Michigan and Dr. Nancy J. Tarbell and Dr. Debra F. Weinstein, both of Harvard Medical School, say while federal law allows family leave, policies set by graduate programs and medical-specialty boards can make that unworkable if they require training to be completed within a fixed time frame.

“It is unrealistic and inappropriate to expect trainees to delay childbearing or to forgo spending critical time with their infants,” they write. “We therefore need new solutions.”

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 06:18 PM

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Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Patients and doctors struggle separately with medical errors, Journal authors say

Doctors aren’t the only ones who can become paralyzed by guilt, fear and isolation after medical errors occur.

Patients and families also struggle with these emotions, Dr. Tom Delbanco and Dr. Sigall K. Bell discovered when they made a documentary about the impact of medical errors. They write about the parallel experiences in tomorrow’s New England Journal of Medicine.

“I had no idea, frankly, and I’ve been a primary care provider for 36 years,” Delbanco said in an interview. He and Bell are both from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “It had never entered my mind that family members could feel the same kind of guilt that we as doctors feel. It had never entered my mind they would say, ‘If only I’d been more assertive with the doctor before this happened’ or ‘If only I’d listened to my instincts.’ ”

Another surprise, Delbanco said, was how reluctant people are to speak up, afraid that they will get worse care, particularly if they are from disadvantaged immigrant groups.

Doctors don’t talk for three different reasons, he said.

“We tend to run away from people we hurt rather than get close to them, we just plain don’t know what to say, and we’ve been told by lawyers to keep our mouths shut and that someone will take care of this,” he said. “We drift away rather than reach out to the people who need us.”

Building bridges to injured patients would be a first step, after the taboo of mentioning mistakes is dispelled, the authors write. They also suggest teaching healthcare providers about preventing errors and how to respond when they do happen. Their 2006 documentary has been shown to third-year medical students at Harvard.

"Everyone involved needs an organized structure that restores communication and supports emotional needs," they write. "The yield from working in partnership could be enormous, both improving people's experience with medical errors and preventing harm from occurring in the future."

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 05:16 PM

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Boston group to share genetic data on autism

A Boston group is sharing genetic information from families affected by autism with other researchers to promote understanding of the developmental disorder.

The Autism Consortium, whose members include hospitals, medical schools and universities in the Boston area, will transfer profiles of 500,000 genetic variations found across the genomes of 700 families with two or more children who have autism. The data will be held by the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange, a program of the advocacy organization Autism Speaks. Scientists can apply to the exchange, which gathered DNA from the families. The samples have been scanned for sequences where there are deletions or extra copies of DNA segments. The consortium is sharing the genetic variations it found.

"We returned all of the raw data to AGRE so they can distribute it to any other investigtors who want to begin exploring what may be the genetic underpinnings of autism," Mark Daly, a consortium member from Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said in an interview. "Understanding the genetics underlying a complex disease is not an easy problem to solve. So there's no excuse for hoarding your data when much more can be learned by sharing."

Only a small percentage of autism arises from a recognizable genetic cause, such as Fragile X syndrome, Daly said. Recent research suggests that some families with autism might have higher rates of genomic abnormalities, but very few of these abnormalities have been conclusively identified.

"There's very strong heritability to autism but very little of the heritability has been explained by specific mutations of specific genes," he said. "What we hope is that this data is a starting point. We need to perform collaborative research in the spirit of the Human Genome Project to deliver on the trust the public has placed in us."

Members of the Autism Consortium are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Medical Center, Boston University, Boston University School of Medicine, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge Health Alliance, Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, McLean Hospital and Tufts-New England Medical Center.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 11:37 AM

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Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Who needs sleep?

Just as weary but exhilarated Red Sox fans head into the World Series on two days' rest, the New York Times devotes its Science section to the subject of sleep.

“To do science you have to have an idea, and for years no one had one; they saw sleep as nothing but an annihilation of consciousness,” Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, told the Times. “Now we know different, and we’ve got some very good ideas about what’s going on."

Boston researchers are prominent in the story, beginning with cognitive neuroscientist Robert Stickgold of Harvard and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He and postdoctoral student Matthew Tucker are studying the effect of naps on memorized words. Matthew Wilson of MIT is investigating what happens to mice cells when they record memories. Subimal Datta of Boston University School of Medicine is looking at the chemicals that bathe the brain while we sleep.

“During waking we have a thousand things happening at once, the library is filling up, and we can’t possibly process it all,” Datta says in the Times story. “It’s during sleep that we have this special condition to clear away this overload."

Something to sleep on before tomorrow night's Game 1.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 10:34 AM

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Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Mayor Bloomberg to receive Harvard public health award

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has championed bans on cigarette smoking in restaurants and bars and banished trans fats from restaurant menus, is receiving the highest award bestowed by the Harvard School of Public Health.

Bloomberg, a native of Medford, will receive the Richmond Award in a ceremony Oct. 29 at Harvard. The award is named for Dr. Julius Richmond, an emeritus professor at Harvard who served as US surgeon general from 1977 to 1981 and was the first national director of the Head Start program.

Along with his campaigns against smoking and fatty foods, Bloomberg has been lauded -- and, in some camps, vilified -- for his efforts to keep illegal guns off the street, a passion shared by Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino. Most recently, the New York mayor has embraced aggressive measures to curtail pollution in the city, raising the specter of charging drivers who venture onto Manhattan's traffic-clogged streets.

Bloomberg is no stranger to schools of public health: He has one named for him. His financial backing led Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to call its school the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Posted by Karen Weintraub at 05:56 PM

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Harvard launches new website

Harvard Wednesday launched a new website – HarvardScience – to feature the scientific, medical, and engineering work done at the university’s schools and related hospitals.

The site has a snappy design, and includes profiles, breaking news and stories about topics from agriculture to zoology. Today’s headlines include Harvard chemists’ construction of nanowires that can carry and create electricity, as well as a study led by Massachusetts General Hospital researchers finding that the drug companies have increasingly cozy relationships with medical schools and teaching hospitals.

Posted by Karen Weintraub at 04:34 PM

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Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Community partnerships needed to recruit minority patients to cancer clinical trials

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."

About 3 percent to 5 percent of all cancer patients participate in clinical trials that study ways to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer. Fewer than 1 percent of African-American patients do.

Historic barriers, including lack of trust or limited access to health care, aren't the only reasons, Baquet said. Patients need to hear from their health care providers that they might have the option of joining the studies, which are typically run by researchers at academic medical centers.

"It's a total myth that underserved communities have no interest in research," she said. "It's just that it has not been presented in a way that they can consider the benefits."

Groups like the Cherishing Our Hearts and Souls Coalition, which works to improve health among African-Americans in Roxbury, is an example of efforts to make research better reflect different populations, she said. The group is one of three pilot programs in the US funded by the Lance Armstrong Foundation with the goal of including more minorities in research.

Trust is still an issue, Tarma Johnson, director of clinical health services at Mattapan Community Health Center, said at a separate session for primary care practitioners. She was involved in recruiting patients for a clinical trial about vitamin D led by Boston University School of Medicine researcher Dr. Michael Holick. The patients were interested in what she told them, which could apply to cancer studies, too.

"The information came from the health center, not the hospital, because they trust us," she said.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 02:37 PM

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Thursday, October 11, 2007

Second Harvard team heading to Congo to help women injured by rape

Physicians and public health specialists from Harvard will join their colleagues in Congo to care for women who have suffered rape-related injuries.

The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative has been working since May with Panzi Hospital in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where up to 70 percent of girls and women have been raped or sexually mutilated, the group said in a statement today. Their medical problems include pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease (including HIV), and traumatic fistula – a condition that leaves women incontinent. A story in Sunday's New York Times describes the brutal violence that brings about 10 women to the Panzi Hospital each day.

The Harvard surgeons and researchers will perform gynecologic surgery, begin training programs, and initiate research into the causes of the violence. Their efforts will be coordinated with Doctors Without Borders, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the International Urogynecological Association, V-Day, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and University of Illinois.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 03:28 PM

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Boston-Denver team to lead study of COPD

A team of researchers from Boston and Denver will lead a large study of genetic factors and biological mechanisms involved in progressive lung diseases.

Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver are the lead sites for the five-year, 16-center study of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis. The two hospitals have received $37 million from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

The researchers hope to enroll 10,500 participants, including 3,500 African-Americans. COPD is rising among African-Americans but risk factors in this population have not been adequately studied, according to the two hospitals' news release.

The Harvard School of Public Health, working with Johns Hopkins University, Brigham and Women's and the University of Colorado, will provide statistical analysis.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 02:20 PM

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Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Children get recommended care less than half the time

Children get recommended care from their doctors less than half the time, leaving them even worse off than adults, concludes an analysis of medical care in 12 cities including Boston.

Researchers from the University of Washington, RAND and UCLA reviewed the medical records of more than 1,500 children and evaluated the quality of care they got as outpatients. They chose 175 quality indicators, from prescribing asthma medications to immunizing against childhood diseases to screening for sexually transmitted diseases.

To measure quailty, they divided the number of times the children's charts showed that recommended care was ordered or given by the number of times the care was warranted, based on national guidelines for screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up.

Overall, children received recommended care 46.5 percent of the time, they write in tomorrow's New England Journal of Medicine. That compares with a rate of 54.9 percent for adults.

When children had acute medical problems, they got the right services 67.6 percent of the time. For chronic conditions, they were given the indicated care 53.4 percent of the time. That falls to 40.7 percent for preventive care.

The authors note that research and policy devoted to children have concentrated more on expanding access to healthcare for children than on providing the right care.

"Deficits in the delivery of care must be identified if appropriate strategies to close the gaps are to be developed and implemented," they write.

Dr. James M. Perrin and Dr. Charles J. Homer of Harvard Medical School called the findings "shocking," while pointing out the study's limitations. Some of the data are 10 years old and failures in keeping accurate medical records may be a factor in the "dismal story," they write in an accompanying editorial.

"Services are not delivered when they should be, or they are delivered when they should not be," Perrin and Homer say in their editorial, also in tomorrow's journal. "Although one could challenge the precise 46.5 percent value for the percentage of overall care delivered, one cannot avoid the main observation that there exists a yawning chasm in the quality of health care provided to children."

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 06:45 PM

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WSJ blog: Harvard scientist devises way to bring vaccines to the poor, via China

Harvard scientist John Mekalanos (left) came up with a way to make vaccines much more cheaply, but to actually produce them, he had to fly to China, the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog reports.

Mekalanos struck a deal with Gerald Chan, a venture capitalist who is opening a vaccine factory on a tropical island called Hainan, one of the regions China has targeted for foreign investment, the blog says. Harvard will license Mekalanos’s method to Chan’s Morningside Group. The result will be a company with scientists working in Boston and on Hainan to develop a commercial vaccine.

The deal allows Harvard to license any vaccines the company creates to governments and humanitarian groups in the developing world, Isaac Kohlberg, the chief of Harvard’s technology development office, told the WSJ blog. Morningside would be able to sell the vaccine in the developed world.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 08:51 AM

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Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Breast-feeding medical student to take licensing test tomorrow

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

A Harvard medical student who went to court to get extra time to pump breast milk during a licensing exam will start taking the test tomorrow.

Sophie Currier, who is breast-feeding her 5-month-old daughter, sued the National Board of Medical Examiners on Sept. 5 when it refused to give her more than the usual 45-minute break allowed to students taking the nine-hour exam. Since then the case has gone through seven rulings.

Today the Supreme Judicial Court denied a request from the board for an expedited review of the case after a state Appeals Court ruling on Friday cleared the way for Currier to have the extra time. The examination board had also asked for a single justice to hear an appeal, but the court did not rule on that petition, board spokeswoman Carol Thomson said in an interview.

"Sophie Currier is scheduled to take the test tomorrow and the following day," Thomson said. "The board certainly will comply with the court's requirements and she will take the test with extra time."

Currier, who must pass the test before beginning her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, has been granted permission to take the test over two days because of her dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. She will get an hour of extra break time each day.

The 33-year-old Brookline resident had argued that it would be uncomfortable and possibly harmful to her health if she could pump breast milk only during standard breaks.

Currier was unavailable to comment today, her spokeswoman Alex Zaroulis said.

"Sophie is looking forward to taking the test tomorrow. She's focused, she's prepared," Zaroulis said. "This has all been about Sophie being able to take this test and be able to express milk while she takes the test in a humane and sanitary way."

One of her lawyers said she found it troubling that the organization responsible for licensing doctors continues to take such an "anti-female approach."

"We took this case pro bono because we believed strongly in the legal positions that were set forth regarding a nursing mother's right in the workplace and by extension, a nursing mother's right to be able to become a doctor and take the medical exam without being at risk for physical harm," said Lauren Stiller Rikleen, who worked on the case with Christine Smith Collins of the law firm Bowditch & Dewey.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 06:45 PM

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Monday, October 8, 2007

Howard Hiatt honored by Institute of Medicine

The Institute of Medicine today presented the 2007 Gustav O. Lienhard Award to Dr. Howard H. Hiatt, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, former dean of its School of Public Health and a senior physician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital.

The $25,000 award recognizes Hiatt's contributions to improving the performance of personal health services in the United States and around the world, the institute said in a news release.

"Throughout his professional life, Howard Hiatt brought compassionate and innovative approaches to health and medical care," said Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine. "He introduced fresh analytic methods to medical and public health education, fostered interdisciplinary approaches to complex health problems, cultivated a new generation of socially responsible physicians, illuminated key challenges to making the best use of limited health resources, pioneered in research on patient safety, and championed successful programs to reduce health disparities. Many of today's leaders in health can trace the roots of their accomplishments to the inspiration, example, and guidance of Howard Hiatt."

Hiatt was formerly chief of medicine at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, led a pioneering study of medical malpractice, called the Harvard Medical Practice Study, and helped to create the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham in 2001.

Posted by Gideon Gil at 01:09 PM

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Five Boston researchers named to Institute of Medicine

Five Boston researchers have been elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine, a prestigious group established by the National Academies of Science to analyze health issues and make recommendations on policy.

Among the 65 new US members, five are from Massachusetts (four from Harvard, one from MIT), three are from Connecticut (all from Yale) and one is from New Hampshire (Dartmouth). The current 1,538 active members chose new members from candidates nominated for achievement and commitment to service, the IOM said in its announcement of new members today.

The Massachusetts members are:

Dr. Emery N. Brown, professor of anesthesia, department of anesthesia and critical care, Massachusetts General Hospital; and professor of computational neuroscience, health sciences, and technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. William G. Kaelin Jr., investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and professor, Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Dr. David T. Scadden, professor of medicine and co-chair, department of stem cell and regenerative biology, and co-director, Harvard Stem Cell Institute; and director, Center for Regenerative Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital

Jonathan G. Seidman, professor of genetics, Harvard Medical School

B. Katherine Swartz, professor of health economics and policy, department of health policy and management, Harvard School of Public Health

The three new members from Connecticut are:

Dr. Robert J. Alpern, dean, Yale University School of Medicine

Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, professor of medicine and epidemiology and public health, and professor of internal medicine, Yale University School of Medicine

Dr. Mary E. Tinetti, professor of medicine, epidemiology and public health, and director, Yale Program on Aging, Yale University School of Medicine

New Hampshire has one new member:

Jonathan S. Skinner, professor of economics, Dartmouth College, and professor of community and family medicine, Dartmouth Medical School

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 11:44 AM

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Nobel for medicine honors gene targeting in mice

Mario R. Capecchi (from left), Sir Martin J.
Evans and Oliver Smithies

Three scientists who modified genes in mice using embryonic stem cells have won this year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, the Swedish Academy announced this morning.

Mario R. Capecchi of the University of Utah, Sir Martin J. Evans of Cardiff University and Oliver Smithies of the University of North Carolina will share the prize for discoveries that made gene targeting possible. Their work led to creation of "knockout mice," or animals whose genes have been modified so scientists can study development, physiology or disease.

Capecchi, born in Verona, Italy, in 1937, earned a doctorate in biophysics at Harvard in 1967 and is now a US citizen. Evans was born in Great Britain in 1941. Smithies was born in Great Britain in 1925 and is now a US citizen.

At Harvard, Capecchi's Ph.D. advisor was James D. Watson, a previous Nobel winner for his co-discovery of the DNA double helix. Capecchi, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, credits Watson for inspiring his development as a scientist and his pursuit of big questions, according to the institute's website.

"He taught me not so much about how to do science but rather provided me with the confidence to tackle any scientific question that fascinated me, regardless of its complexity," Capecchi is quoted on the site. "He also taught me the importance of communicating your science clearly and to pursue important scientific questions."

Capecchi told the journal Nature in 2004 that his relationship with Watson was not always smooth. He recounted a disagreement they had about the results of an experiment. Capecchi was unconvinced by the data and wanted to repeat the experiment while Watson wanted to publish the results. Capecchi then threw away glass plates containing crucial bits of data, ensuring that the results could not be published and prompting Watson to explode in anger. Capecchi recalled: "I came that close to being thrown out of the lab."

Capecchi's childhood was disrupted by World War II in Italy, according to the Nature article and the Hughes website. When he was 4 years old, his mother, a poet, was taken by the Gestapo to a concentration camp, and he lived on the streets, begging and stealing, until they were reunited five years later. After the war, they emigrated to the United States, where Capecchi began school at age 9, knowing no English and unable to read or write.

"It is not clear whether those early childhood experiences contributed to whatever successes I have enjoyed or whether those achievements were attained in spite of those experiences," he said.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 07:47 AM

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Friday, October 5, 2007

Breast-feeding medical student wins break time

A Harvard medical student battling for extra time to pump breast milk during a licensing exam plans to take the test as soon as she can after a court ruling in her favor today.

The state Appeals Court declined to reverse a ruling made by a single justice last week that cleared the way for Sophie Currier to have extra time.

"I'm going to take the test as soon as possible," Currier said in a phone interview before referring other questions to a spokeswoman so she could return to studying.

The 33-year-old Brookline mother of a five-month-old girl sued the National Board of Medical Examiners when it refused to give her more than the standard 45-minute break allowed to students taking the nine-hour exam. Currier, who must pass the test before beginning her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, has been granted permission to take the test over two days because of her dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Joseph Savage, the board's attorney, argued that granting Currier extra time would not be fair to other test-takers. Savage did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment.

Today's ruling did not consider the merits of the case. Instead it was based on whether the single justice whose decision overturned a superior court's denial of Currier's claim showed abuse of discretion or a clear error of law. The court found neither.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 01:53 PM

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Ig Noblesse oblige

Nobel laureates (seated, from left) William Lipscomb,
Robert Laughlin, Craig Mello, Roy Glauber and Dudley
Herschbach taste Ig Nobel-prize winning ice cream
flavored by vanillin derived from cow dung.
(Kees Moeliker / Annals of Improbable Research)

You had to be there.

At last night's Ig Nobel prize ceremony, paper airplanes, pointless chicken references and acceptance speech poems sailed through Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The mood was part Mardi Gras, part Marx Brothers as the Annals of Improbable Research induced real Nobel laureates to play along with real scientists whose published work first made people laugh, and then think, journal editor and master of ceremonies Marc Abrahams said.

There was sword-swallowing, natch, from the Tennessee winner Dan Meyer, who studied sword swallowing's side effects. There was ice cream from Toscanini's made, so the real laureates were told, using Japanese Ig Nobel winner Mayu Yamamoto's formula for deriving vanillin from cow dung. Craig Mello, last year's Nobel winner in medicine, was the first to dip his spoon into his dish as the crowd chanted "Eat it!"

There was 2005 physics Nobelist Roy Glauber, wearing a Chinese straw hat and wielding a twig broom, sweeping paper airplanes off the crowded stage as he has done for 10 years of Ig Nobel celebrations.

And there were chicken and/or egg costumes made out of black garbage bags that Mello, Glauber, and their good-natured peers Dudley Herschbach (chemistry 1986), William Lipscomb (chemistry 1976) and Robert Laughlin (physics 1998) climbed into and burst through on cue.

You had to be there.

But there's another chance to enjoy the merriment: At 1 p.m. tomorrow, the Ig Nobel winners will make presentations in MIT Building 10, Room 250. Check out their prizes and real references.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 11:46 AM

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Thursday, October 4, 2007

Ig Nobels pop tonight

By Elizabeth Cooney, Globe Correspondent

Bottomless soup bowls, vanilla made from cow dung, a net that drops on bank robbers and "gay bombs." And don't forget discriminating rats listening to Japanese and Dutch. Backwards.

Must be time for the Ig Nobel Prizes again, when the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research recognizes scientists with a sense of humor from around the world for achievements that made the judges laugh and think.

Harvard's Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan is the only local laureate this year. He took the prize in physics for studying how sheets become wrinkled. Seems a little mild, next to the soup bowl that refilled itself in an experiment measuring people's appetites. But that sounds more appetizing than the vanillin, which really did come from livestock excrement.

The robber-nabbing net? Its Taiwanese inventor seems to have vanished, the Ig Nobel organizers report.

Gay bombs, however, were found at an Air Force research lab in Ohio that developed a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. The technical term is "Harassing, Annoying and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals."

And those rats? Turns out, sometimes they can't tell the difference between Japanese and Dutch spoken backwards. Huh.

This year's ceremony, at which real live Nobel laureates give out prizes to the winners -- 7 of the 10 were expected to show up at their own expense -- was webcast tonight from Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

Here's the list of winners:

MEDICINE PRIZE
Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tenn., for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."
REFERENCE: "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects," Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer, British Medical Journal, December 23, 2006, vol. 333, pp. 1285-7.

PHYSICS PRIZE
L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
REFERENCES:
"Wrinkling of an Elastic Sheet Under Tension," E. Cerda, K. Ravi-Chandar, L. Mahadevan, Nature, vol. 419, October 10, 2002, pp. 579-80.
"Geometry and Physics of Wrinkling," E. Cerda and L. Mahadevan, Physical Review Letters, fol. 90, no. 7, February 21, 2003, pp. 074302/1-4.
"Elements of Draping," E. Cerda, L. Mahadevan and J. Passini, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 101, no. 7, 2004, pp. 1806-10.

BIOLOGY PRIZE
Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.
REFERENCES:
"Huis, Bed en Beestjes" [House, Bed and Bugs], J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, vol. 116, no. 20, May 13, 1972, pp. 825-31.
"Het Stof, de Mijten en het Bed" [Dust, Mites and Bedding]. J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk Vakblad voor Biologen, vol. 53, no. 2, 1973, pp. 22-5.
"Autotrophic Organisms in Mattress Dust in the Netherlands," B. van de Lustgraaf, J.H.H.M. Klerkx, J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Acta Botanica Neerlandica, vol. 27, no. 2, 1978, pp 125-8.
"A Bed Ecosystem," J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Lecture Abstracts -- 1st Benelux Congress of Zoology, Leuven, November 4-5, 1994, p. 36.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE
Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.
REFERENCE: "Novel Production Method for Plant Polyphenol from Livestock Excrement Using Subcritical Water Reaction," Mayu Yamamoto, International Medical Center of Japan.

LINGUISTICS PRIZE
Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
REFERENCE: "Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats," Juan M. Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, vol. 31, no. 1, January 2005, pp 95-100.

LITERATURE PRIZE
Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
REFERENCE: "The Definite Article: Acknowledging 'The' in Index Entries," Glenda Browne, The Indexer, vol. 22, no. 3 April 2001, pp. 119-22.

PEACE PRIZE
The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
REFERENCE: "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals," Wright Laboratory, WL/FIVR, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, June 1, 1994.

NUTRITION PRIZE
Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.
REFERENCE: "Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake," Brian Wansink, James E. Painter and Jill North, Obesity Research, vol. 13, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 93-100.
REFERENCE: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink, Bantom Books, 2006, ISBN 0553804340.

ECONOMICS PRIZE
Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
REFERENCE: U.S. patent #6,219,959, granted on April 24, 2001, for a "net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately."

AVIATION PRIZE
Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
REFERENCE: "Sildenafil Accelerates Reentrainment of Circadian Rhythms After Advancing Light Schedules," Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 23, June 5 2007, pp. 9834-9.

Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 10:30 PM

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Breast-feeding student to reschedule exam, wait for court ruling

(Michele McDonald/Globe Staff)

Sophie Currier with her white coat and her baby.

By Globe Staff

Sophie Currier, the Harvard medical student who sued because she wanted time to pump breast milk during a licensing exam, will postpone taking the exam, her lawyer said Wednesday.

Currier had planned to take the exam this week after Massachusetts Appeals Court Judge Gary Katzmann ordered that she should get the extra time. But a three-judge panel of the court on Tuesday stayed Katzmann's order, promising a ruling by next Wednesday.

Carol Thomson, a spokeswoman for the National Board of Medical Examiners, said, "The next step for us is to await their conclusion."

She noted that Currier could take the exam under normal conditions or reschedule.

Christine Collins, Currier's lawyer, said Currier planned to reschedule so she could see how the court ruled.

"We're fairly confident that the judges are going to affirm Judge Katzmann's decision and order," she said.

Posted by Karen Weintraub at 11:06 AM

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Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Harvard's Allston science complex approved

Harvard University won final approval today from the Boston Redevelopment Authority for a four-building science complex that will be the first major project in the university's new Allston campus.

The complex, with an estimated cost of $1 billion, will house Harvard's Stem Cell Institute and the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. The project will face Western Avenue, across the street from the old WGBH-TV studios.

Posted by Gideon Gil at 05:49 PM

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New anesthesia method blocks pain without numbness or paralysis

By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff

The world's hottest work in anesthesiology is being done at Harvard, where researchers are pouring pepper on pain.

Scientists at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital today described a new "targeted" approach to anesthesia that uses the active ingredient in chili peppers as part of an ingenious recipe for blocking pain neurons. Most critically, the technique doesn't cause the numbness or partial paralysis that is the unwelcome side effect of anesthesia used for surgery performed on conscious patients.

If approved for use in humans, the method could dramatically ease the trial of giving birth -- by sparing women pain while allowing them to physically participate in labor. It could also diminish the trauma of knee surgery, for instance, or the discomfort of getting one's molars drilled. Not only would there be no "ouch," there would be none of the sickening wooziness or loss of motor control that comes from standard forms of "local" anesthesia.

In time, the process might even be employed for major surgery on the heart and other organs, the researchers said. More prosaically, the work might also represent a breakthrough cure for the common itch.

The work on lab rats, described in the scientific journal Nature, breaks from the standard approach to local anesthesia, which usually involves anesthetics delivered by catheter tubes or injections that silence all neurons in a given region of the body, not just those that sense pain. Shutting down just the pain neurons means that patients could still feel a light touch and other non-hurtful sensations.

"This could really change the experience of, for example, knee surgery, tooth extractions, or childbirth," said Dr. Clifford Woolf, senior author of the study and a researcher in anesthesia and pain management at Mass. General. "The possibilities are almost endless."

Woolf collaborated with Bruce Bean, professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, in research that employed surprisingly basic scientific principles as well as some unlikely ingredients -- capsaicin, the stuff that imparts "hot" to chili peppers, as well as an all-but-forgotten variation of a standard anesthesia, long dismissed as clinically useless.

"We plucked a little of this and little of that off the shelves," Bean said. "The project is really a great illustration of how basic biological principles can have very practical applications."

Indeed, scientists with no involvement in the Harvard study were most surprised by its simplicity.

"It's a really clever piece of work, based on one of those 'I wish I'd thought of that' ideas," said Dr. Stephen G. Waxman, head of the department of neurology at Yale University's School of Medicine. "This is an important piece of research."

There's also sweet historic symmetry to the discovery.

Boston, after all, is the city that invented feeling no pain -- at least in surgery.

Modern anesthesia was first successfully employed in surgery in October 1846, one of the greatest moments in medicine. In Boston's Public Garden, the second-largest statue -- after that of George Washington on his horse -- is a soaring pillar, adorned with roaring lions and bas-relief depictions of 19th Century surgeons, that celebrates the "discovery that the inhaling of ether causes insensibility to pain. First proved to the world at the Massachusetts General Hospital."

Not far away, modern Mass. General's original "ether dome" still stands, a national landmark and popular pilgrimage point for anesthesiologists from around the world.

The work undertaken by Woolf, Bean and post-doctoral researcher Alexander Binshtok exploits well-known concepts of how electrical signals in the nervous system depend on ion channels -- proteins that make passageways through the membranes of nerve cells. Pain-sensing neurons possess a unique channel protein, TRPV1, but one that is usually blocked by a molecular "gate."

Medicine for more than 150 years has relied on general and standard anesthetics that penetrate and suppress sensation in all neurons, not just those nerve cells dedicated to sensing pain. That's why an epidural or a simple shot of Novocain leaves a whole region of the body numb or paralyzed, because all nerves cells are affected.

Enter the hot chili pepper, in the form of capsaicin.

Enter, too, a failed derivative of the common anesthetic lidocaine, invented in the 1940s. The derivative, known as QX-314, was deemed useless because it couldn't penetrate cell membranes to block sensation. In non-pharmaceutical terms, that's a bit like having a power shovel that can't cut earth.

In experiments, the Harvard researchers found that the chili pepper ingredient generated heat that opened the gate to pain neurons, but had no similar effect on other nerve cells. Then, when they introduced the lidocaine derivative, it charged through the open channels to block pain in those neurons, but was still unable to enter other nerve cells, such as "motor" neurons that control coordination and mobility.

Thus, in rat experiments, there appeared to be a total shutdown of pain, with no apparent numbness or paralysis.

The rats received injections near nerves leading to their hind feet, and lost the ability to feel pain in their paws. But they continued to scamper about their cages normally and showed sensitivity to touch and other stimulation.

"We introduced a local anesthetic selectively into specific populations of neurons," said Bean. "Now we can block the activity of pain sensing neurons without disrupting other kinds of neurons that control movements or non-painful sensations."

Experimentation will likely move on to to sheep, then humans. One problem that needs to be addressed is whether the capsaicin might cause such a burning sensation when first injected -- before the lidocaine derivitive shuts down the pain -- that it may be too uncomfortable for use as an anesthetic. But the researchers are confident they can find a more practical "warming" chemical to open the gateways to the pain neurons.

"This method could really transform surgical and post-surgical analgesia. Patients could remain alert without suffering pain. But they also wouldn't have to cope with numbness or paralysis," Woolf said.

Noting that itch-sensitive neurons are similar to nerves that sense pain, he added: "We may have even found a good treatment for the common itch."

Posted by Gideon Gil at 01:43 PM

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Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Mass. law slows stem cell research, Harvard scientist says

By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff

One of Harvard’s best and brashest used a major conference on stem cells to lambaste the policies of a commonwealth that takes huge pride in medical research

"In Massachusetts, we have a law meant to support stem cell research, but it creates restrictions that are more onerous than in states" where religious fundamentalists, conservative legislators and other opponents actively fight medical research involving human embryos, Kevin Eggan said today at the Stem Cell Summit, a two-day conference that brought some o