Faculty Bibliography

'Medical journals shouldn't be static ' he said. 'They should change. What directions we'll go in are up for grabs.' Dr. [Jerome P. Kassirer] has also helped edit a section of Kidney International, a monthly specialty journal published by Springer-Verlag in New York City. He said that he had learned 'how poorly many supposedly distinguished researchers and clinicians write' and that 'many times I have had to take their papers apart and put them back together again.' 'In trying to make themselves look the best, the journals overlooked the real reason for doing research, which is to advance science and medicine,' Dr. Kassirer said, adding that he 'would not have wanted to be one of the editors' cited

In recent studies, growth of the AIDS virus in laboratory experiments was significantly suppressed by the addition of an amino acid, glutathione, that plays an essential role in the body's system for fighting infection

The findings have led federal health officials to seek approval to begin studies on human beings to determine whether some form of this amino acid, glutathione, can halt or slow progression from infection with the AIDS virus to the disease. In the latest laboratory studies, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Alton Meister of Cornell University Medical School in New York City headed a group that found that the addition of glutathione and two related substances each suppressed the growth of the AIDS virus by 80 percent to 90 percent

The FDA has rejected a recommendation from one of its expert panels that could greatly reduce the amount of blood available through military and civilian blood banks

The dean of Cornell University's medical college, G. Tom Shires, resigned to become head of surgery at Texas Tech University's medical school

A fungus that is the leading cause of fatal infections among AIDS patients has afflicted a small number of elderly New Yorkers without AIDS and experts do not know why, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine

In the first place, there is no conclusive evidence that any infected doctor has ever infected a patient. The case of a Florida dentist, three of whose patients have the same strain of virus as he did, has riveted the attention of the Federal Centers for Disease Control, which for the past several months has been debating guidelines. But the obvious explanation, that the dentist infected his patients by bleeding his virus-laden blood into their mouths, is not the only one. Contaminated instruments could have played a role in spreading the virus from one patient to another. There is wide agreement that the risk of infected health care workers' transmitting the AIDS virus to patients, though real, is tiny. New York State health officials estimated the risk as somewhere between one in 100,000 and one in one million per procedure. And there is wide agreement that the risk is much greater that infected patients will transmit the AIDS virus to health care workers. Doctors and dentists who are infected with hepatitis B virus are allowed to continue practicing until evidence is found that they have spread hepatitis B. Many experts have argued that if recommendations call for testing health care professionals for the AIDS virus, they should also include hepatitis B

A lawyer for Kimberly Bergalis, who was apparently infected with the AIDS virus by her dentist, David J. Acer, confirmed that a federal investigation showed that two other patients were almost certainly infected in the dentist's office

Researchers conducting one of the first tests of an AIDS vaccine in uninfected volunteers have reported that early results suggest that the vaccine is safe and well tolerated. The vaccine was successful in producing certain types of immune responses

A standard way has been to publish results in scientific journals after experts scrutinize the data in an editing process known as peer review. Editors of scientific journals rely on peer review in part to assure that authors do not make unwarranted or misleading claims, particularly from data that require analysis by advanced statistical techniques. At the core of the debate are policies set by many journals, like Nature, Science and The Journal of the American Medical Association, that are perceived to apply embargoes less strictly than The New England Journal of Medicine, which created the Ingelfinger rule. It is named for Dr. Franz J. Ingelfinger, who devised it to overcome competition from trade publications in the 1970's, when he was editor of the journal. Another reason was that many experts had regularly scrutinized the data as part of the safety monitoring process in all clinical studies. All major studies 'have already been through a process of peer review more rigorous' than that of most journals, said Dr. [Vincent T. DeVita], now chief physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.