Faculty Bibliography

Mr. Grinkov's heart stopped while he and Ms. Gordeyeva were practicing for an ice show. Mr. Grinkov said he felt dizzy and gently slumped to the ice. At first, those around Mr. Grinkov thought he had been seized with a recurrence of low back pain and sciatica and wanted to rest. But Mr. Grinkov did not respond. So his coach immediately started CPR in front of Ms. Gordeyeva and other shocked onlookers. He was soon joined by an emergency medical technician who was in the arena. 'Although it now seems clear that he was dead from the beginning, as time went on you just felt life slipping away and the likelihood of recovery less and less, and finally you resort to putting a needle in the heart' to inject a stimulant, epinephrine, Dr. Schwartzberg said. When the last ditch effort was unsuccessful, Dr. Schwartzberg said he had 'the painful but agonizing decision of saying, this is futile, let's not go any further.' He pronounced Mr. Grinkov dead. Mr. Grinkov's death was a medical mystery, and an autopsy would be performed because this was a death that could not be explained by a personal physician. Dr. Schwartzberg knew there would be speculation about what had caused Mr. Grinkov to die. So he made a point of discussing the autopsy with Ms. Gordeyeva and seeking her consent for it. There had been no history of abusing drugs, but Dr. Schwartzberg and the pathologist wanted toxicology tests to be sure. She agreed.

'Who thinks a healthy world-class athlete age 28 exercising vigorously without symptoms would have coronary artery disease,' Schwartzberg said. 'This is an enigma. But it happens and is hard to understand. Everyone in the emergency room who dealt with this situation was just in a daze afterward; it is so unbelievable.' 'If you have a familial tendency to have atherosclerotic heart disease, it does not matter really whether you are an athlete or not,' Varga said. 'Because if you are an athlete, that does not make you immune to the effects of coronary artery disease.' 'At least today we have clarity and understanding,' Schwartzberg said. 'We know exactly what happened and it does make sense, as rare an event as it was.'

When Dr. Valavanur A. Subramanian ran a scalpel along Edward Dowling's left fourth rib to make a three-inch incision from near the nipple to the breast bone one day last month, the operating room at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan was eerily silent. The operation on Dowling, a 66-year-old piano tuner, involved a new procedure known as minimally invasive direct coronary bypass surgery. Instead of stopping the heart and having a heart-lung machine take over its duties, Subramanian's team performed a delicate operation on the organ as it continued to beat. Subramanian's approach is one of several ways minimally invasive coronary bypass surgery is being done. Some versions are modeled after the video-assisted, fiber-optic techniques developed for gallbladder and other surgeries. Others have modified decades-old methods to sew arterial grafts onto beating hearts without using heart-lung machines. 17

Dr. Navarro-Valls's discussion about the Pope's health reflects a radical break in Vatican policy, which had maintained the strictest secrecy about the personal affairs of popes. 'Because of a long historical tradition,' Dr. Navarro-Valls said, 'anything concerning a pope's private life was private. It was a nonwritten rule, and that was it.' After the Pope's leg operation, for example, Dr. Navarro-Valls said he showed the Pontiff's X-rays to reporters to explain what the surgeons had done. 'Journalists were absolutely surprised,' Dr. Navarro-Valls said. Before Pope John Paul II went to a hospital in 1992 for the removal of a tumor from his colon, 'he himself announced publicly in St. Peter's, 'Pray for me, I am going to the hospital, they do not know exactly what it is,' ' Dr. Navarro-Valls said. 'That was a surprise.'

Federal health officials on Sep 21, 1995 recommended coronary bypass surgery over angioplasty for diabetics with coronary artery disease because of surprising long-term findings from the world's largest study of the two heart procedures

Summary: A study at Johns Hopkins University finds that people with the enervating ailment have a kind of hypotension A small study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association strongly links chronic fatigue syndrome to a common abnormality in the way the body regulates blood pressure

Louis Pasteur, one of the legendary figures in the history of science, lied about his research, stole ideas from a competitor and was deceitful in ways that would now be regarded as scientific misconduct if not fraud, according to a revisionist history published this month. The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, by Dr. Gerald L. Geison of Princeton University, is based on an examination of Pasteur's 102 laboratory notebooks, which have been well preserved for more than a century. In 1881, after having helped to establish the germ theory of fermentation and disease, Pasteur turned to veterinary and human medicine. He tried to reduce the virulence of microbes by exposing them to oxygen in order to make them suitable for vaccination. But in developing a vaccine against anthrax, a bacterial infection that was economically important because it was a major killer of sheep, Pasteur adapted a method he had used a year earlier to produce a vaccine against chicken cholera. To head off competitors, Pasteur had purposely withheld reporting the simple method he used to prepare the chicken cholera vaccine

Edward B. Lewis, Eric F. Wieschaus and Christiane Nusslein-Volhard won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Oct 9, 1995 for discovering how genes control the early structural development of the body. All three studied the fruit fry to begin to unravel the secrets of how embryos develop from a single cell into well-differentiated anatomical structures like brains and legs. The research helps to explain birth defects in humans

The warning by the National Eye Institute applies to the estimated 5,400 patients who suffer bacterial eye infections each year after cataract surgery, a procedure that 1.35 million Americans undergo annually. Beyond sparing patients the discomfort of a second surgical eye procedure, health officials said that their recommendations, if fully implemented, would save at least $40 million a year in health costs by eliminating many hospital stays and intravenous antibiotics, which cost about $4,000 for each patient. The study's purpose was to determine the effectiveness of intravenous antibiotics as well as a surgical procedure to replace the gel-like filling inside the eye. Eye doctors have used the treatments for many years although their safety and effectiveness have not been determined in a scientifically controlled study. Patients whose vision initially was worse had much better visual results with vitrectomy than with the minor procedure. With vitrectomy, this group of patients was three times more likely to achieve 20/40 final vision (33 percent compared with 11), twice as likely to achieve 20/100 final vision (56 percent compared with 30) and less than one-half as likely to incur severe visual loss of less than 5/200 (20 percent compared with 47)

Fifty years after tuberculosis became curable, a worldwide surge in drug-resistant strains of the disease is occurring not just because of the limits of medical science but also because of the profit motives of pharmaceutical companies, experts at an international meeting here last week said. There are more cases of tuberculosis today than ever worldwide. At least 2 million people die from it each year, many from strains of the bacteria that have become resistant to the available drugs. Yet, even though new drugs have been developed and are ready for testing, pharmaceutical companies are unwilling to invest the money it would take to bring them to market, said participants at the meeting, which was sponsored by the Lancet, an international medical journal published in London