Faculty Bibliography

In 1959, Arthur Kornberg was awarded a Nobel Prize in medicine for the discovery of DNA polymerase, an enzyme needed to synthesize the master molecule of heredity.

The Journal of Biological Chemistry initially rejected Kornberg's two classic papers. He said the journal told him that a peer, the noted scientist Erwin Chargaff, had written 'an exceedingly sarcastic letter' in assessing his findings. In 1967, Kornberg and his team became the first to produce the active inner core of a virus in a laboratory. President Lyndon Johnson hailed the report of the feat as 'one of the most important stories you ever read' because it 'opens a wide door to new discoveries in fighting disease and building healthier lives.'

An ultrasound revealed a deep venous thrombosis, a blood clot, in the lower part of his left leg. He was treated with anticoagulant medication, which he will take for several months, and he returned to work. Although blood clots in the leg can be dangerous if left untreated, experts say most are successfully treated with the anticoagulant drugs that the White House says Mr. [Dick Cheney] is now receiving. The blood clot that was discovered in Mr. Cheney's leg on Monday was in a vein, not an artery, and several independent experts said there was most likely no connection between it and the 2005 surgery. Dr. Cameron Akbari, a senior vascular surgeon at Washington Hospital Center in the District of Columbia, said Mr. Cheney's history of heart disease put him at only ''a very slightly increased risk'' of developing a deep venous thrombosis. Vice President Dick Cheney speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars yesterday. Mr. Cheney experienced discomfort in a leg after the speech. (Photo by Chris Kleponis/Bloomberg News)

''This technique has a big potential in the vascular surgical field,'' said Dr. Toshiharu Shinoka, who directs pediatric cardiovascular surgery at Yale and who plans to conduct studies with Cytograft on the new vessel. He called the technique an advance over one he used in operations on children in Japan, in which vessels were grown from cells on a scaffold that then degraded and was absorbed into the body. Doctors not connected with the company agreed on the importance of the new technique. ''A potential benefit may be for infants and children with congenital heart defects,'' said Dr. Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease at the University of California, San Francisco. Unlike grafts from cadavers, he added, ''the Cytograft vessels should be able to grow as the child does.'' Dr. Sergio A. Garrido, a vascular surgeon in Buenos Aires, said he implanted the Cytograft vessels in the forearm or upper arm under general anesthesia, in a different area from the malfunctioning shunt. The procedure took 60 to 90 minutes. Through surgical gloves, the Cytograft vessel, 5 1/2 to 11 * inches long, felt a little more delicate than a regular vein, he said

[John W. Mellors], who was not involved in the studies but has been a consultant to the manufacturers of the drugs, said he 'wouldn't be going out on a limb' to say the new results were as exciting as those from the mid-1990s, when researchers first discovered that cocktails of drugs could significantly prolong lives. While there are now 20 approved drugs to treat HIV and AIDS, there are only four different mechanisms by which the drugs work. In many patients, the rapidly replicating virus evolves resistance to one or more drugs, usually because patients don't take their drugs on time as prescribed

The survey's senior author, Dr. Martin A. Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins, said in an interview that surgeons had made ''little progress in the last 20 years'' in preventing needle stick injuries. And hospitals, he said, ''are not doing what they should to care for their own providers, their families and patients.'' Such an experience among surgeons in training ''traumatizes their psyche on top of the stress of residency,'' Dr. Makary said. ''They do not know whether to tell their significant other,'' he said, ''and if they do report it to hospital officials, they worry about being stigmatized.''

Merck's drug works by inhibiting the action of integrase, an enzyme produced by the virus that incorporates the virus' genetic material into the DNA of a patient's immune cell. Once incorporated, the viral DNA commandeers the cell to make more copies of the virus. Pfizer's drug works by blocking a portal on human immune system cells that HIV uses to enter and infect the cell. It would be the first drug for AIDS that works by blocking a protein that is part of the human body rather than something in the virus. About 85 percent of newly infected patients have a virus that uses CCR5 while only about half of patients who have a resistant virus use CCR5. There has been some concern that blocking CCR5 would encourage the development of viruses that use the alternative portal -- and those viruses seem to be associated with worse outcomes

At that point, [Robert Cooksey] said on television, [Andrew]'s smear tests showed no tuberculosis bacteria 'and so, by the guidelines, he was not considered infectious' to others. But guidelines issued by the World Health Organization say that 'patients with multiple drug resistant tuberculosis should not travel until' no tuberculosis bacteria grow on culture tests performed in a laboratory

The outbreak resembles one last year that was linked to a different manufacturer's lens solution and a different microbe. In both instances, the cornea, the eye's transparent outer covering, is at risk. But why two different microbes caused the outbreaks is not known. ''It is beyond comprehension,'' said Dr. Dan B. Jones, the chairman of ophthalmology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who detected a case of acanthamoeba keratitis, which is behind the current outbreak, on Friday. Acanthamoeba infections have been reported in many countries. Dr. Jones's team is credited for first identifying a corneal infection from acanthamoeba in the United States, in a rancher who was injured in an accident in Texas in 1973. That case did not involve contact lenses: while the rancher was working in a field, a piece of wire and hay hit his eye

In 1983, Dr. Brandt said that investigating the disease had become ''the No. 1 priority'' of the Public Health Service. At the time, only 1,450 AIDS cases had been reported. William H. Foege, the agency's director at the time, said in an interview Wednesday that ''Ed Brandt continually fought on the inside'' to reduce the number of staff and budget cuts. Dr. Vivian Pinn, who directs the Office of Research on Women's Health at the National Institutes of Health, said Dr. Brandt was also recognized as ''the godfather of women's health'' for his efforts as assistant secretary of health and human services to encourage more study of the issue. ''He was instrumental in promoting the careers of many people, especially women in science and women's health,'' Dr. Pinn said