Faculty Bibliography

Dr. Henry Miller, the medical officer in charge of Humulin at the F.D.A., said the development was a major step forward in the ''scientific and commercial viability of'' recombinant DNA techniques. ''We have now come of age,'' Dr. Miller said. Ronald Culp, a spokesman for Eli Lilly & Company, said the initial cost of the new insulin will be higher than that for animal insulins now available. ''We expect the average daily patient cost to be between 50 and 55 cents a day for the treatment,'' he said. ''That compares with between 26 and 30 cents. The long-term desire is that the cost will come down, but at this point we cannot speculate on just how far. The ultimate aim is to make it cheaper, however.'' Mr. Culp said the human insulin would be given a ''phased introduction'' to the public. ''Lilly believes that diabetes specialists should be given an opportunity to become familiar with [Humulin] before it is available commercially,'' he said

''We are very close'' to eliminating measles and ''there is a very good chance'' it will occur within the next few weeks, Dr. Alan Hinman, an epidemiologist at the Atlanta center said in a telephone interview. Not far behind the United States is Czechoslovakia, where one of the two republics - the Czech Socialist Republic - has been free of measles all year, Dr. Hinman said. And health officials in Sweden and Finland recently announced plans to eliminate measles in those countries. The Texas outbreak, which resulted in 60 of the 63 cases of measles reported last week, was linked to a student at Baylor University at Waco who had been doing missionary work in Central America. The infectious period appears to be over because the last victim became ill on Oct. 3, Dr. Hinman said, ''but we can't be certain yet.''

Those reports in The New England Journal of Medicine were orthodox scientific recitations of the research, for all the world as though, after a logical, planned sequence, the researchers, crying ''presto'' and ''eureka,'' had come up with a hitherto unknown bacterium, just as they had known they would from the start. Dr. Julius H. Comroe Jr. of the University of California Medical School at San Francisco, who has studied the history of several discoveries, has said it well: ''Most scientists don't like to be regarded as discoverers, but rather as scientists who have meticulously and logically planned each step in a direct line leading from ignorance to full knowledge. Few 'tell it like it was' in their scientific writing, and editors of journals probably delete, as unscientific, most of the 'chance' story that authors do put in their manuscripts.'' The tendency to ''fictionalize'' discovery and to publish incomplete accounts is a disservice to both the scientific profession and the public. It creates a false impression that the scientific process is simpler than it truly is. That impression is an unheralded reason why scientists have a difficult time defending their budgets

All three Nobel winners expressed delight and surprise when they were informed of the award. ''I had no idea,'' Dr. [Bengt Samuelsson] said. Dr. [Sune Bergstrom], who is chairman of the Nobel Foundation Board and had long been mentioned as a possible candidate, said, ''You are always surprised.'' It was actually another Swedish Nobel laureate, Dr. Ulf S. von Euler, who was once Dr. Bergstrom's teacher, who named the substances prostaglandins in the mid-1930's after he first detected them in seminal fluid and assumed that they came from the prostate gland. Although the prostate has a rich supply of prostaglandins, they have been found throughout the body and the original name has persisted. Dr. Samuelsson was cited for giving a detailed picture of arachidonic acid, from which all the various types of prostaglandins - and there are dozens - are created. He was also cited for clarifying the chemical processes involved in the formation and the body's use of prostaglandins, and for discovering various prostaglandin subtypes

It is an unusual type of dysentery, Dr. Roger A. Feldman said, in which ''the diarrhea is predominantly blood.'' Morever, the sickness seems to cause no fever, unlike other forms of dysentery and colitis. Dr. Feldman said the disease usually began with pain on the right side of the abdomen. The pain is so severe that some victims have likened it to the pains of childbirth, he said. Then an epidemiologist in Michigan found an uncooked hamburger from the lot involved in the Traverse City outbreak. It yielded E. coli ''0157-H7.'' At the Miami meeting, which was sponsored by the American Society of Microbiology, Dr. [Mitchell L. Cohen] said his investigators had concluded that the disease seemed to come from inadequately cooked hamburgers. He added that the Atlanta center had characterized illness caused by E. coli ''0157-H7'' as ''a newly recognized disease.''

There are actually plenty of potential donors to meet American health needs. Studies by Federal health officials have shown that, in fact, there should be no shortage of kidneys -one of the most commonly transplanted organs. Kidneys, like the other organs, are unavailable because of little-publicized inefficiencies in the health care delivery system and the apathy of many members of the medical profession and of the public. Doctors and hospital administrators often fail to identify would-be donors and to notify transplant surgery teams when such patients are available. And transplant teams themselves have been criticized for poor communications with referring doctors. He and other transplant surgeons say they believe that the laws in New York and elsewhere impede them from improving people's health and returning them to work. According to Dr. [Frank J. Veith], at least 27 states have adopted laws that specifically recognize the declaration of death on the basis of data showing loss of brain activity. However, New York is one of the states that lack such a statutory definition. Many doctors feel compelled to use the old customary criteria to declare death, meaning in practice that the heart has stopped beating, by which time it and other organs may not be salvageable. Yet many doctors do declare death on the basis of the lack of brain activity. Many transplant surgeons are concerned that the shortage of donor organs inevitably will lead to pressure for those needing organs to buy them on a kind of black market. Although the thought of selling organs is repugnant to most people, just one state -Georgia - specifically forbids the practice. Elsewhere, it is only the unwritten code of ethics of transplant surgeons that prevents this potential sellers' market from becoming an actuality. LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D

Cyclosporine is available on an experimental basis from Sandoz Inc. of Hanover, N.J., which manufactures it as Sandimmune. Its use requires approval from the Food and Drug Administration, which has classified it as 1-A as a so-called ''fast-track'' drug, indicating that, though full approval is not yet granted, the drug has important medical potential and testing should proceed at a speedy pace. In 1978, Dr. Roy Y. Calne, a surgeon at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, England, became the first to use cyclosporine in a transplant operation. Dr. Calne, who probably had more experience with the drug than anyone else, said, ''In every organ it has been tested for, cyclosporine appears to be better than'' other existing drugs. Surgeon's New Optimism Cyclosporine - like any drug used to counter the body's natural rejection phenomenon - must be taken for life, with some continued suppression of the immune system and therefore some continued threat of infection. Nevertheless, the drug does seem to have reduced the toxicity related to transplantation more than any other previously used drug. So far, cyclosporine seems to reduce the amount of steroids needed to counter rejection, which has helped limit some of their side effects, such as weakness and loss of muscle tone and bone strength. ''Patients seem to feel better,'' Dr. [Denton A. Cooley] said

Could both areas of bleeding have occurred after the accident? ''Certainly not,'' Dr. [Jean Chatelain] said. ''The first is different from the second. The second is traumatic.'' The experts were also puzzled by what appear to be inconsistencies in the doctors' description of Princess Grace's symptoms. Dr. [Jean Duplay] said earlier that she had ''a small attack'' which, if it had occurred when she was sitting at home, might not have led to serious, permanent damage. But he said that because it occurred while she was driving, it caused her to have a fatal accident. Surgery was not done on Princess Grace because ''there was no indication to operate,'' Dr. Chatelain said. Judgments about brain death are based on repeated clinical examinations of the brain and central nervous system, knowledge from CAT scans of the nature of the problem and its cause, and by brain wave tests. Many have asked why Princess Grace's doctors seemed to have given up hope so quickly by stopping life-support systems the day after the accident

[Macleod], too, deserved at least as much credit as anyone has been willing to give him. ''On their own, Banting and Best were not experienced and knowledgeable enough to have carried their work through to a successful conclusion,'' Professor [Michael Bliss] says. ''They badly needed Macleod's advice.'' By late January 1922, [Collip] had found it. But with Macleod's permission he refused to share it with Banting and Best. Banting, obsessed with fears that Macleod and Collip were taking over the project and would deny him the credit, grabbed Collip, a much smaller man; according to Best, ''Collip was fortunate not to be seriously hurt.'' He continued, ''I can remember restraining Banting with all the force at my command.'' THE hormone called insulin is a 60-year-old success story that still makes news in ways that would have astounded its discoverers. The current example is a contest among the world's largest producers of insulin to see which kind of laboratory alchemy is most likely to capture a large share of a future world market that may total more than $300 million a year. It is really a three-way contest between highly purified animal insulin; ''human'' insulin made by genesplicing methods in bacteria and ''human'' insulin made, by conventional chemistry, from the pancreases of pigs

At these examinations, many parents feel like troubled and confused bystanders, watching arcane interactions between a doctor and a baby. Doctors as a class are not notorious for explaining their behavior, even to informed and inquisitive patients, and they are very busy people. Babies cannot even speak, at first. What is going on here? Knowing some essential facts about what the pediatrician does in his work is crucial if parents are to understand and evaluate the care the baby gets, and if they are to cooperate with the doctor in looking after the welfare of his valuable patient