Faculty Bibliography

There was no legal way to expel Mr. [Svensson], because ''no national policy covers the situation,'' Dr. Harriet Wallberg-Henriksson, the Karolinska's president, said last month. The only grounds for expulsion would be if he were a threat to others or had a psychiatric illness, she said. ''That seemed strange to us, so on Wednesday we asked the national agency responsible for verifying application documents to check,'' and they could not verify the transcript, Dr. Wallberg-Henriksson said in a telephone interview on Thursday. ''We were under the assumption that they had done it because that's their responsibility.'' She met with students again when Mr. Svensson identified himself before his classmates. At that meeting, Mr. Svensson spoke for about 10 minutes without apologizing for the murder or his past. He did say, ''Today, I am not the person I was 10 years ago,'' Dr. Wallberg-Henriksson said

No one knows how many Swedish doctors have criminal records, in part because of Swedish laws and culture that emphasize personal integrity. When Mr. [Svensson]'s classmates were asked at a student meeting how many had criminal records, nine other men and women said they did, according to an article in the medical student union's publication, Medicor. No definition of what constituted a crime was given. Speaking of the general problems in admitting a murderer to medical school, Dr. [Harriet Wallberg-Henriksson] said: ''In the final analysis, it comes down to trust, because when you are a patient you are putting your life in someone else's hands.'' Last week, she said that because Mr. Svensson's expulsion was based on a technicality, his case did not resolve the broad issue of who is fit to be a doctor and whether a murderer forfeits the right to become one. That, she repeated, is up to Swedish legislators and government officials, who have given her mixed messages so far

The standard influenza vaccine still protects against the mutant virus, said Hayden and Dr. Alicia Fry, an influenza epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The institute said the other half of the award would be shared equally by two French virologists, Dr. Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Dr. Luc Montagnier, for discovering HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Since its discovery in 1981, AIDS has rivaled the worst epidemics in history. An estimated 25 million people have died, and 33 million more are living with HIV. The Karolinska Institute said that discovery of HIV by the French scientists, Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier, led to blood tests to detect the infection and to antiretroviral drugs that are effective in prolonging the lives of patients. The tests are now used to screen blood donations, making the blood supply safer for transfusions. The viral discovery has also led to an understanding of the natural history of HIV infection in people, which ultimately leads to AIDS unless treated. Dr. John Niederhuber, director of the National Cancer Institute, said Monday that Gallo 'was instrumental in every major aspect of the discovery of the AIDS virus.' He added: 'Dr. Gallo discovered interleukein-2, an immune-system-signaling molecule, which was necessary for the discovery of the AIDS virus, serving as a co-culture factor that allowed the virus to grow. Numerous scientific journal articles, many co-authored by Dr. Gallo and Dr. Luc Montagnier, cite the two scientists as co-discoverers of the AIDS virus.'

With modifications, scientists should be able to grow a human heart by taking stem cells from a patient's bone marrow and placing them in a cadaver heart that has been prepared as a scaffold, Ms. Taylor said in a telephone interview from her laboratory in Minneapolis. Todd N. McAllister of Cytograft Tissue Engineering in Novato, Calif., said, 'Doris Taylor's work is one of those maddeningly simple ideas that you knock yourself on the head, saying, 'Why didn't I think of that?'' Mr. McAllister's team has used a snippet of a patient's skin to grow blood vessels in a laboratory, and then implanted them to restore blood flow around a patient's damaged arteries and veins.

Todd N. McAllister of Cytograft Tissue Engineering in Novato, Calif., said, ''[Doris A. Taylor]'s work is one of those maddeningly simple ideas that you knock yourself on the head, saying, 'Why didn't I think of that?'<0>'' Dr. McAllister's team has used a snippet of a patient's skin to grow blood vessels in a laboratory, and then implanted them to restore blood flow around a patient's damaged arteries and veins. ''The heart is a beautiful organ,'' Dr. Taylor said, ''and it's not one that I thought I'd ever be able to build in a dish.'' Beginning Jan. 15, Adam Liptak's column, ''Sidebar,'' will appear on Tuesdays. Dan Barry's column, ''This Land,'' will return on Monday, Jan. 21

Using cells from newborn rats, researchers in Minnesota built a new heart that..

'We just took nature's own building blocks to build a new organ,' [Doris Taylor] said of her team's report in the journal Nature Medicine. The researchers removed all the cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the valves and outer structure as scaffolding for new heart cells injected from newborn rats. With modifications, scientists should be able to grow a new human heart by taking stem cells from a patient's bone marrow and placing them in a cadaver heart that has been prepared as a scaffold, Taylor said in a telephone interview from her laboratory in Minneapolis. The early success, she said, 'opens the door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas - you name it and we hope we can make it.' 'If it works,' Taylor said, 'it means that there'll be many more organs available for transplants.'

Experts not involved in the Minnesota work called it 'a landmark achievement' and 'a stunning' development, but they and the Minnesota researchers cautioned that the dream, if ever realized, was still a decade away. With modifications, scientists should be able to grow a human heart by taking stem cells from a patient's bone marrow and placing them in a cadaver heart that has been prepared as a scaffold, [Doris A. Taylor] said in a telephone interview from her laboratory in Minneapolis. The early success 'opens the door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas -- you name it and we hope we can make it,' she said