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doi: 10.1001/jama.1997.03550180015004pmid: N/A
Our dissection began as a tribal ritual. Only this time, instead of ceremoniously dancing in hopes of reaping a large crop or creating a drought-ending rainfall, we came seeking knowledge. Knowledge passed down perhaps somewhat callously, as is our custom, from one generation to the next so that we can contemplate death before we attempt to understand life. We arrive in full costume: white coat, rubber gloves, dissection manual, scalpel, scissors, and a fresh change of clothes in case the mixed smell of formaldehyde and decaying flesh decided to follow us home. My face was painted with the grave, forbidding expression that the cadavers themselves might have had if they had known I was about to carve them up, system by system, organ by organ, vein by vein, and nerve by nerve, until all that would remain is a box of scraps 2 feet by 2 feet. We stood outside
doi: 10.1001/jama.1997.03550180025010pmid: N/A
AS AN OPHTHALMOLOGIC surgeon, Edward J. Holland, MD, tries to offer hope to hopeless eyes. One of his beneficiaries is 77-year-old Donald Smolley. The men met several years ago at the University of Minnesota Hospitals and Clinics in Minneapolis, where Holland directs the Corneal and External Disease Service. After a burning backsplash of drain-clearing liquid in 1968, Smolley was left legally blind in his right eye and with little vision in the left. A corneal transplant in Smolley's right eye shortly after the injury failed outright. Some sight returned to his left eye, and Smolley continued working as building superintendent at the Minneapolis public library. But eventually the left eye began to fail. Smolley took early retirement, and he and his wife moved to the small western Minnesota town of Montevideo. "I couldn't see to go across the street; I couldn't see what was on my plate at dinner," Smolley
doi: 10.1001/jama.1997.03550180027011pmid: N/A
IN CAT'S CRADLE, novelist Kurt Vonnegut conjured a bizarre ice crystal called ice-nine that brings about disaster by converting the earth's oceans into ice. Last month, the 1997 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology honored Stanley B. Prusiner, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), for controversial research showing that a novel class of infectious "rogue proteins" called prions similarly appears to wreak a type of transformational havoc on the brain of humans and other mammals. Prusiner's pioneering work, said the Nobel committee of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, in its announcement of the award, uncovered "an entirely new genre of disease-causing agents" that many scientists believe are responsible for a variety of deadly neurodegenerative diseases. The list includes kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD),Gertsmann-Sträussler-Scheinker (GSS) disease, and fatal familial insomnia in humans, as well as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies such as scrapie and mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE])
doi: 10.1001/jama.1997.03550180028012pmid: N/A
Normal retina (left); retina of a patient with diabetes and proliferative retinopathy (right). "The eye with diabetic retinopathy provides a unique 'window' for noninvasively studying the vascular damage diabetes causes in the kidney and other organs," said Robert Goldstein, MD, PhD, vice president for research, Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International. THANKS TO recent advances in understanding how hyperglycemia may damage blood vessels in the eyes of patients with diabetes, several novel therapies for preventing diabetic retinopathy are now under study. The latest research on potential therapies was discussed at the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International (JDFI) Oxford Conference on Diabetic Retinopathy, at St John's College, Oxford University, Oxford, England, in September. The conference, which was sponsored by the JDFI (headquartered in New York, NY) and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, brought together many of the world's leading investigators of the pathogenic mechanisms behind diabetic retinopathy and other complications of
doi: 10.1001/jama.1997.03550180029013pmid: N/A
TO IMPROVE the safety of imported food, the US government is reaching out to the farm. Plans are being developed to inspect the production sites of fruits and vegetables that come to the United States from abroad as thoroughly as such suppliers are examined in this country. The effort is to ensure food safety at the production level, not just at the import point. If the administration's plans are realized, produce from a country with an inferior food safety system will be banned. This is a fundamental change from current efforts, in which suspect foods are seized at the port of entry. The move comes in the wake of repeated occurrences of foodborne illness from imports and at a time when importation of foods into the United States has been growing rapidly. One estimate is that it has doubled in the past decade. The list of outbreaks of disorders caused
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