Faculty Bibliography

Animal experiments show that a drug derived from a Chinese tree is a potent agent against colon cancer

A drug derived from a Chinese tree has proved to be the most potent agent against colon cancer in experiments on animals, scientists are reporting in a medical journal. The drug, 9-AC, caused rapid and dramatic shrinking of human colon cancers that had been transplanted into mice and did not show any evidence of major adverse effects, scientists from four institutes say in the journal Science. Dr. Robert Silber of New York University Medical Center, one of the authors of the report, said the team was reluctant to describe the long remissions as cures because the cancers could recur sometime before the mice die

A research team led by Dr Annlia Paganini-Hill of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles reported in the Nov 18, 1989 issue of the British Medical Journal their new study of elderly people which concluded that taking daily doses of aspirin increases the risk of kidney and heart disease

The FDA is probing at least 243 possible cases of a strange flu-like illness that appears to be linked to the non-prescription drug L-tryptophan, which is used as a dietary supplement

''That is one of the greatest canards'' inflicted on premedical students, Dr. [Myron S. Magen] said in an interview. ''They know we are lying and consequently they load up on the sciences, and that is what we look at.'' Dr. [Lewis Thomas] placed the blame squarely on the admission policies of the nation's 127 medical schools. These institutions, he said, ''used to say they wanted applicants as broadly educated as possible, and they used to mean it.'' Dr. [David W. Fraser] said that as an undergraduate majoring in biology at Haverford, his goal was to become a college teacher. His experience, he said, ''told me I didn't want to be a lab scientist doing what my mentors were doing.''' Now, Dr. Fraser said, he wishes he had majored in philosophy.

The score is one of the simplest, least costly, most widely used tests in medicine. Many pediatricians consider it one of the most useful, but other doctors argue that the test is outmoded and abused, renewing a debate that has simmered almost since Dr. Virginia Apgar announced the test in 1953. Lancet said that many Apgar scores were erroneous because of variability among those who perform the test and because hospital staff members are sloppy in the way they perform the test and record the results. For example, in a separate reply to Lancet, a team of doctors in Birmingham, England, reported on a study of 100 babies with a low Apgar score that determined 61 of them had received care that was possibly less than optimal

When cyclosporine was stopped, the woman's dying liver was saved by FK-506. Since then FK-506 alone has had stunning results in experimental use in more than 100 transplant patients, and other scientists familiar with the work credit Dr. [Thomas E. Starzl] with saving FK-506 from being discarded. Dr. [Richard D. Leavitt], the Fujisawa official, said the company's researchers tested scores of samples before they came across FK-506 and could not have discovered the drug without the new screening tests. ''The chance of getting a strike is remote,'' said Dr. Varro E. Tyler, the executive vice president of Purdue University and a former dean of its school of pharmacy. But, he added, ''one of the sad things about the drug discovery process is that it has been too narrowly focused'' in recent decades. Tens of thousands of isolates from the soil were screened only for a specific activity such as for use against bacteria and fungi and not for broader purposes, Dr. Tyler said. He added that with broader screening ''we probably would have picked up several useful drugs.'' ''It is all right to pick out a new soil sample, a new microorganism or new chemical entity because you can patent that,'' Dr. Tyler said. ''But there are a lot of natural substances known for centuries that no one will do the necessary work on because they could not get exclusive patent protection and wouldn't recoup their research costs.''

Doctors of 57-year-old Buck Helm, the man who survived the Interstate 880 collapse during the Oct 17, 1989 earthquake in Northern California, say the man was on the verge of a cardiac arrest when rescuers found him. Doctors say he probably would not have survived another day trapped in the wreckage

[Buck Helm]'s condition was upgraded from critical to very serious and may improve again to serious, [Floyd Huen] said. He said Helm was likely to spend two or three more days on a respirator