Faculty Bibliography

Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, 66, will step down as editor on Sept. 1 and then begin a seven-month sabbatical until his contract expires on March 31, he and Dr. Jack T. Evjy, the society's president, said in interviews yesterday. Dr. Kassirer and Dr. Evjy declined to provide specifics of the dispute beyond saying it involved sharp differences in ''administrative and publishing issues.'' The forced resignation has caused several members of the society's publications committee, charged with guarding the integrity of the journal, to consider resigning in protest. One, Dr. John T. Harrington, the dean of Tufts University School of Medicine, said he resigned because the dispute and its resolution ''were not brought to the committee's attention until they were presented as a fait accompli'' at a meeting on July 14. Dr. Kassirer was a Tufts faculty member before becoming editor

For the unlucky, death by lightning comes from the sudden catastrophic disruption to the heart's rhythm, which can speed it up to a deadly pace or stop it altogether. But even when lightning doesn't kill (most people survive), the force of the tens of millions of volts delivered in one one-thousandth of a second can instantly break a person's bones and literally blow the shoes right off a victim. The sudden surge of electricity can also cause severe burns to the skin, singe nerves, blood vessels and thebrain, and cause temporary blindness or deafness. In the aftermath, survivors often suffer depression, memory loss and post-traumatic stress disorder

Last week federal health officials called on doctors to stop using the standard rotavirus vaccine, RotaShield, at least until November. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called for suspending the use of RotaShield due to reports of 20 babies who had developed a painful blockage of the bowel after swallowing the vaccine

[Ludwik Gross] was born in Krakow, Poland, on Sept. 11, 1904. Both his parents were lawyers, and his father was a member of the Austro- Hungarian parliament. After earning his medical degree at Jagiellonian University in Krakow in 1929, Dr. Gross trained in internal medicine for three years at St. Lazar General Hospital there. Over the years the 'frank hostility' diminished as Dr. Gross went on to show that radiation or a chemical could induce leukaemia in an animal by activating a dormant virus. As time passed, other scientists developed vaccines against the feline leukaemia virus in cats and a cancer known as Marek's disease in chickens. In 1974, Dr. Gross was awarded an Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation prize for his discovery of what has become known as the Gross mouse leukaemia virus

So Dr. [Ludwik Gross] injected material from leukemic mice into newborn mice of a strain known to be free of the leukemia, thus isolating a virus. He then showed that the virus was passed naturally through successive generations of mice to cause leukemia. 'Thus,' Dr. Gross said, 'not only in chickens but also in mammals,' he had demonstrated that leukemia often had a viral cause

An experimental vaccine for rotavirus, the leading cause of severe diarrhea in infants and young children, may be more effective and easier to deliver than the recently suspended standard vaccine, a new report says