Faculty Bibliography

Is AIDS an epidemic inadvertently brought on by human testing of a polio vaccine in Africa in the 1950s? In 'The River,' Edward Hooper suggests that an experimental polio vaccine might have been made with chimpanzee tissue that had been tainted with an ancestor of the AIDS virus. He finds coincidences in the time and place between the earliest AIDS cases and the testing of a vaccine developed at Philadelphia's Wistar Institute and, later, in two Belgium labs. From 1957 to 1960, the vaccine was given to a million people in what are now Rwanda, Burundi and Congo

Now the Institute of Medicine, the medical arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has called for a new federal office to protect patients and said Congress should require all health care providers to report mistakes that cause serious injury or death. The main question is how the proposed system might work. While many health-related organizations and consumer groups welcomed the proposal, others expressed concern about additional government involvement in personal healthcare. Still others, including President Clinton, were concerned about patient confidentiality. Health maintenance organizations say they wonder how frank discussion of errors can occur as long as health care providers fear malpractice suits. In a report issued on Monday, the academy said there was a clear need to impose 'rigorous changes' throughout the fragmented health care system to reduce the estimated 44,000 to 98,000 deaths from medical errors each year in the United States

Dr. Daniel Nathans, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist who pioneered the use of scalpels in analyzing DNA, a technique that helped create the biotechnology industry, died on Tuesday at his home in Baltimore. He was 71 and had taught at Johns Hopkins University for 37 years. DNA is shaped like a double helix, and Dr. Nathans broke apart the long twisted strands of DNA molecules by using what is known as the restriction enzyme technique. Then he reconstructed the molecules in different combinations to help solve basic problems in biology. Dr. Nathans produced ''one of the most fundamental tools in modern genetics research,'' said Dr. Victor McKusick, a leading geneticist and the former chairman of medicine at Johns Hopkins

A drug that has been marketed for eight years to combat high blood pressureturns out to substantially lower the risk of heart attack, stroke, bypasssurgery, and diabetes and its complications in those who have heart disease,scientists reported yesterday. The findings suggest that at least 10 million Americans and their doctorsmay want to add the drug, ramipril, to standard heart therapies and that itcould save tens of thousands of lives each year at a cost of about 85 cents aday, said the study's chief author, Dr. Salim Yusuf of McMaster University inHamilton, Ontario, in an interview. The study was conducted among individuals with heart or blood vesseldisease but without heart failure, Yusuf said in reporting the findingsyesterday at the AHA meeting in Atlanta. Participants also had at least onerisk factor for heart disease or strokes, such as high blood pressure,elevated cholesterol levels or cigarette smoking

Dr. Gunter Blobel, a cellular and molecular biologist at New York's Rockefeller University, won the 1999 Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for discovering that proteins carry signals that act as ZIP codes, helping them find their correct locations within the cell. The research that Blobel has conducted for 30 years has had an 'immense impact' on studies of the cell and helps explain the molecular mechanisms behind diseases such as cystic fibrosis, a condition that creates a certain type of kidney stone in young children, and other hereditary illnesses, the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced. There are a billion protein molecules in an average human cell. Cells are constantly dividing or being repaired to replace those damaged or lost to everyday wear and tear. The mystery that Blobel helped solve was learning how the cells regulate internal traffic so the protein molecules 'go to the right address,' he said in an interview. Blobel, who recalled witnessing the World War II bombing of Dresden as a child, said he was donating most of the $960,000 in prize money to the Friends of Dresden, an independent American group that supports the reconstruction, restoration and preservation of Dresden's artistic and architectural legacy. The group is helping rebuild the Frauenkirche, a bell-shaped church that was a fixture in prewar Dresden. Blobel, who is not Jewish, said he is also donating part of the award to the reconstruction of a synagogue in Dresden

A year after he received a new right hand and forearm in a transplant operation in France, Clint Hallam of Australia has gained a sufficient grip to ride a motorcycle and even write with a pen, his doctors say. After the experimental transplant was performed Sept. 23, 1998, many doctors predicted failure, saying a body would reject the combination of skin and dozens of muscles, tendons, nerves and blood vessels in the donor arm. They added that even if the foreign tissue were accepted, Hallam's brain could not power nerves that had been severed in a prison accident 14 years earlier, and the new arm would be a useless stump

Reporting on the first comprehensive study of these diseases in prisons and jails, the lead author, Dr. Theodore Hammett, said the high prevalence of AIDS among prisoners reflects their widespread use of drugs before they were imprisoned. He presented the findings Tuesday at the National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta. Prisons are a critical setting for detecting and treating sexually transmitted diseases, Hammett said, but the quality of health care varies widely. About 90 percent of the prisons and jails say they make the newer combinations of anti-HIV drugs available, but not necessarily to all inmates, Hammett said

Doctors in Boston reported yesterday that a bone-marrow transplant had enabled a kidney transplant patient to survive without antirejection drugs and that nearly a year later, she was showing no sign of rejection. The circumstances of the operation were unusual: the patient had a form of cancer, multiple myeloma, that led to kidney failure as a complication, and doctors said they felt the only possible treatment was a double transplant. But they also hoped the transplants would induce a state of immune tolerance in the patient, a condition known as mixed chimerism. The new procedure has limited use, said Dr. Thomas Spitzer, a transplant researcher at Massachusetts General and a participant in the procedure. In this case, the donor was the patient's sister, increasing the chance of success because of their biological closeness. The doctors also said they used a new, less toxic type of bone marrow transplant, which allows the recipient to preserve most of her own marrow. This led, the doctors said, to the blended immune system that characterizes mixed chimerism

[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

In 1938, as a New York University/Bellevue Hospital intern, I recorded notes on the 384 cases I saw during my 1-month ambulance duty. Although I intended to use them to follow up the clinical course of patients I admitted to Bellevue, the long hours and pressure of work made this ambitious goal unachievable. Sixty years later, after retirement from academic medicine and medical practice at New York University School of Medicine, I found the long-lost notes among my papers. They are of historic interest since they provide insight into aspects of primary and emergency medicine of the era when the therapeutic efficacy of the sulfanilamide class of agents was under investigation, a unique view of the life of an intern just before interns were replaced on ambulances by technicians, and a glimpse of the surprising character of several neighborhoods of pre-World War II Manhattan. The notes also provide the basis for a current analysis of case incidence and treatment by disease category. A description of the confluence of social, economic, and political forces that led to the establishment of the Bellevue Hospital Ambulance Service, the first such urban service in the world, is included