Human rights in East Timor
Other On Campus
Getting women’s health issues on the national radar, Florence Haseltine, M.D., said during a visit to Yale in October,...
HIV as a cure rather than a threat
When Inder Verma, Ph.D., proposed HIV as a vector for gene therapy two years ago, the response was swift. “‘This guy...
Prions, mad cows and the Nobel Prize
For Stanley B. Prusiner, M.D., vindication came in 1997 when he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his...
From Other Issues
Winter 2013
Violence in America
Few of us, said New Haven Police Chief Dean M. Esserman, keep track of how many soldiers die in Iraq and Afghanistan on...
Winter 2013
Lives of people of color neglected in the media
Veteran journalist and civil rights activist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, winner of two Peabodys and two Emmys and author of...
Winter 2013
The mystery of HIV
Only five men were listed in the first official recognition of what would become a worldwide pandemic: five gay men...
Winter 2013
Evidence in our language
Evidence of individual identity almost as incriminating as a fingerprint can be gleaned from how we use language.“A lot...
Autumn 2012
A journal’s 200-year history
When the first issue of The New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and the Collateral Branches of Science...
Autumn 2012
Eliminating health disparities
“Your zip code is a more powerful predictor of your health than your genetic code,” David R. Williams, Ph.D., M.P.H.,...
Spring 2012
Summer heat deadlier
Research models that estimate how many people might die in urban heat waves will help government agencies better...
Spring 2012
Don’t think of cancer as a “Superman”
James D. Watson, Ph.D., subscribes to a personal health regimen that includes doses of the diabetes drug metformin,...
Spring 2012
“Good science has won out”
The controversy over childhood inoculation came to Yale when audience members confronted an expert who declared that...
Spring 2012
Speakers optimistic about future of health care
The Supreme Court is expected to rule in June on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care...
Winter 2012
A message of hope for caregivers and patients
Lee Woodruff, writer and public relations professional, brought a message of hope to the School of Medicine in December...
Winter 2012
Dismantling the Global Fund
In November the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria learned that donor nations, including the United...
Winter 2012
Finding the right words for pain
For a person in great pain, wrote Virginia Woolf, “language at once runs dry.” Woolf’s words resonate for David Biro,...
Winter 2012
Support federal research funding
Bracketing her remarks with anecdotes drawn from personal experience, U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro gave an...
Autumn 2011
Health and social justice are connected
As in the days of the “robber barons,” today’s North American philanthro-capitalists have enormous influence over the...
Autumn 2011
Transformative moment for health care
Although the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act faces legal and political challenges, it provides,...
Spring 2011
Changing the language of medicine
“From the moment we learn to speak the language of medicine,” said Pauline Chen, M.D., HS ’98, “we are taught to...
Spring 2011
Mapping pathways in the human brain
The human brain has 86 billion neurons, connected by 150 trillion synapses that exchange signals through 100,000 miles...
Autumn 2010
Science and starlets vie for attention
Science news, said Emmy Award-winning science reporter Robert Krulwich, must compete for the public’s, and editors’,...
Autumn 2010
Better clinical skills needed for better diagnosis
Basic clinical skills provide crucial information: one study showed that the patient interview provided conclusive...
Spring 2010
Educating the public about science is an uphill battle
Sharon Begley, science editor of Newsweek, despairs of the challenge of educating the American public about science....
Spring 2010
Relying on the kindness of strangers
The central figure in Tracy Kidder’s new book escaped death by machete in his native Burundi, beat overwhelming odds to...
Winter 2010
Outside the bounds of polite conversation
Author and physician Perri Klass explores the connections between medicine and literature.
Winter 2010
When pizza and a starlet compete for attention
When both food and a sexy starlet appear in a television commercial, pizza stirs up more brain activity, but increased...
Winter 2010
Accounting for sex differences in medicine
The key to healing men often lies in studying women first, according to a Yale expert who said that females respond...
Autumn 2009
A new vanguard to address global health
The fight against disease in the developing world has often been waged not by public health professionals, but by...
Autumn 2009
Ubiquitous industry ties have risks and benefits
By the time they’ve reached their third year of medical school, said Eric G. Campbell, Ph.D., virtually all medical...
Spring 2009
Connecticut lags in long-term care for elderly and disabled
Connecticut has made inroads into shifting long-term care for the elderly and people with disabilities from...
Spring 2009
Zimbabwe cholera outbreak has roots in corruption
When cholera struck Zimbabwe last summer, international aid poured into the African country. Despite those resources,...
Spring 2009
Physicians must know how to blow the whistle on torture
Physician complicity in torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib reveals a serious gap in medical education, said former...
Spring 2009
Parental consent needed for genetic screening
Most of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States each year are screened without parental consent for up to 50...
Winter 2009
How climate change affects public health
In 1967 U.S. Surgeon General William Stewart, M.D., announced that it was time to “close the book” on infectious...
Winter 2009
A single-payer system is best Rx in a bad economy
A single-payer system may be the best way to provide health care coverage in the United States, especially when a...
Winter 2009
Noah Webster—from listing definitions to tracking disease
Noah Webster, a 1778 graduate of Yale College, is best known for his eponymous dictionaries, but his lexicographical...
Autumn 2008
Lawsuits could bankrupt vaccine program
A program that encourages childhood vaccinations could collapse under unproven allegations that the shots cause...
Autumn 2008
A gene to protect bone marrow from chemotherapy
In a new approach to cancer treatment, researchers are studying a form of gene therapy that may make bone marrow more...
Autumn 2008
Children, foster care and orphanages
When Nicolae Ceauşescu took power in Romania in 1965, he believed that his country needed a larger work force. He...
Autumn 2008
Bolero, dementia and the creative process
In 1930, when Maurice Ravel composed Bolero, his best-known work, he may have been in the throes of frontotemporal...
Spring 2008
LSD, mescaline and brain receptors
That the brain has specific receptors for various drugs is now an established fact, but it took a long, strange trip by...
Spring 2008
Genomics and personalized medicine
As the sequencing of the human genome approaches its fifth anniversary, Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. ’74, FW ’84,...
Spring 2008
Breakfast matters, even if it’s just a doughnut
Conventional wisdom took a recess when Howard Taras, M.D., told an audience at pediatric grand rounds in February about...
Spring 2008
Vaccines and the flu virus of 1918–1919
In 1918, with the world in the grippe’s grasp, researchers were desperate for a way to stem the pandemic. They turned...
Winter 2008
A third party to speak for the terminally ill
Doctors and nurses in cases involving medically futile treatment often clash with a patient’s loved ones over whether...
Winter 2008
TB, an Atlanta lawyer and 52 South African patients
At first glance a diagnosis of tuberculosis seems to be all that unites Andrew Speaker, an Atlanta lawyer, with 52...
Winter 2008
Seeking a national solution to health care for all
Medicine is witnessing the best and worst of times because of the “staggering difference” between lifesaving advances...
Winter 2008
Speeding the pace of biomarker discovery
Biomarkers that identify cancer in its early and more treatable stages have emerged as the newest tools in its...
Autumn 2007
Can children tell the truth? Evaluating claims of abuse
How, asked Michael E. Lamb, Ph.D. ’76, should police, psychologists and social workers evaluate children’s claims of...
Autumn 2007
Advocating protection against cervical cancer
“This is my favorite topic,” said Laura Koutsky, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington...
Autumn 2007
Granting patents on genes hinders biotech research
Companies shouldn’t hold patents on genes any more than they should own the air we breathe, said David R. Koepsell,...
Autumn 2007
Bringing values, relationships back into medicine
Sarah L. Berga, M.D., administered a dose of idealism to residents in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and...
Spring 2007
Physician-assisted suicide is the wrong solution
At a time when life is devalued, when people are killed over necklaces or iPods, physician-assisted suicide ill serves...
Spring 2007
Is sleep no more than a cure for sleepiness?
In 1989, when scientists kept rats from sleeping, the rats started to die by the 11th day. By the 32nd day, they were...
Spring 2007
The teachings of Maimonides and a moral imperative
The 12th-century physician Maimonides, who lived in Spain and Egypt, achieved fame as a rabbi and philosopher yet...
Spring 2007
Environment and society: which determines health risks?
A two-story house has peeling paint and no yard. Behind it loom industrial smokestacks. Mark R. Cullen, M.D. ’76, HS...
Winter 2007
Changing the ethical culture of pharma
The last five years, said Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., have seen the demonization of the pharmaceutical industry. Conflicts of...
Winter 2007
An ongoing disaster stemming from neglect
For Roberto Johansson, M.D., Ph.D., Hurricane Katrina was a disaster that didn’t have to happen. During a talk at the...
Winter 2007
Tracing the history of medical education
In the mid-19th century, medical schools were faculty-owned, for-profit operations that churned out doctors after just...
Winter 2007
Baboons, humans and stress: the cost of being an SOB
Baboons in Africa’s Serengeti Plain spend just three hours a day finding food, said Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D. “That leaves...
Autumn 2006
Public health plans lacking, although stakes are high
Despite the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax scare, the United States, said Nicole Lurie, M.D., M.S.P.H., has...
Autumn 2006
Contact with nature can be therapeutic
Bringing flowers to a sick friend does more than fulfill a social convention, according to Stephen R. Kellert, Ph.D.,...
Autumn 2006
A champion of health insurance for all
During his lifetime, Isidore S. Falk, Ph.D., professor emeritus of public health at Yale, was a towering figure in...
Autumn 2006
Lessons from a pandemic that never was
In planning for a possible avian flu pandemic, said Harvey Fineberg, M.D., president of the Institute of Medicine, it...
Spring 2006
Emergency care in the wake of Katrina
If there was a good news story about Hurricane Katrina, it was the medical response to the disaster, said Paul K....
Spring 2006
Bright future for a roller-coaster compound?
In 1998, Endostatin, a protein that inhibits blood vessel growth, was touted as a silver bullet for cancer after tests...
Spring 2006
A pioneering lobotomist’s mixed legacy
When he began his biography of Walter J. Freeman, M.D., a Yale College graduate who pioneered lobotomy in the United...
Spring 2006
NBA star makes a giant impact in his African homeland
As he walked through campus last September, Dikembe Mutombo, all-star center for the Houston Rockets, cut a somewhat...
Autumn 2005
In the stem cell debate, asking the right question
The intertwined debate that links abortion to embryonic stem cell research has revolved around the wrong question, said...
Autumn 2005
A new role for RNA as a regulatory molecule
In the last few years scientists have been surprised by small nucleotide sequences, microRNAs and siRNAs (small...
Autumn 2005
Research that makes women visible
Surveying a packed ballroom at New Haven’s Omni Hotel in which women were disproportionately and diversely represented,...
Autumn 2005
Fuggedaboutit! Transient Global Amnesia
A 62-year-old man led a choir through a flawless rehearsal and performance, but by the end of the day he could remember...
Summer 2005
The poor need help from the rich
You don’t get much health care for $4 per person. That’s what India spends on public health each year, far too little...
Summer 2005
Humans change their world, with no end in sight
Over the last 20 years writer Bill McKibben has looked at the ways humans have altered the world around them, and he...
Summer 2005
Iceland’s national health service provides for all
In Iceland, universal access to health care is enshrined in law. As a result the country has no private health...
Summer 2005
Silence among doctors in the face of torture
Even as FBI agents and intelligence officers were warning their superiors that interrogations of detainees in Iraq and...
Spring 2005
What role for the states in stem cell research?
When scientists wanted to discuss the safety of recombinant DNA technologies in the mid-1970s, they convened the...
Spring 2005
A molecular link between the brain and learning
“When axons send signals that are received by dendrites, learning is taking place,” said Mariale M. Hardiman, Ed.D.,...
Spring 2005
Using revolutionary technology to find “a rusty old ship”
After he discovered the wreck of Titanic in 1985, Robert D. Ballard, Ph.D., heard from his mother. “That’s all they’re...
Spring 2005
A moral argument for fighting diseases of the poor
Rachel M. Cohen called for a new approach to drug research and development based on need, not profit, in a September...
Fall/Winter 2004
A human rights view of health care
“What is the cost of not doing the right thing?” Paul Farmer, M.D., Ph.D., asked in March during a talk sponsored by...
Fall/Winter 2004
Cautious excitement about a “living cancer reagent”
The patient was a 57-year-old radiologist with advanced melanoma. The treatment was experimental—it combined...
Fall/Winter 2004
Art and plague in the Middle Ages
When the plague reached Europe in 1348 it was seen as a divine punishment. How else to explain a disease that killed...
Fall/Winter 2004
Striving not to narrow, but to eliminate, racial disparities
For years health statistics have revealed a grim dichotomy—members of racial and ethnic minority groups bear a greater...
Summer 2004
Merging data sets to fight human disease
The sequencing of the human genome has spawned a wealth of knowledge, much of it now available online. According to...
Summer 2004
Biomedical research for the world’s neediest
In 1990 a drug called eflornithine came on the market to treat African sleeping sickness. But a drug marketed to...
Summer 2004
Stumbling across water channels, and a Nobel Prize
In two talks on campus in March Peter C. Agre, M.D., noted with amusement that when he was applying to medical schools,...
Summer 2004
With acupuncture, an integrated view of the body
Acupuncture entered the American consciousness in 1972, when a journalist on President Nixon’s trip to China fell ill...
Spring 2004
In global cooperation “… every human being counts”
Long-term stability for the United States depends on fostering international cooperation, not as a last resort but as a...
Spring 2004
Encouraging physicians to speak “the appropriate language”
Media consultant Andrew Gilman once coached a NASA engineer who was part of the effort to repair the Hubble Space...
Spring 2004
Keeping hope alive for the seriously ill
As a physician caring for seriously ill AIDS and cancer patients, Jerome E. Groopman, M.D., has learned that doctors...
Spring 2004
Examining how a chemical enters the food supply
Health and safety experts are trying to solve a fast-food mystery: why does a probable human carcinogen appear in such...
Winter 2004
At grand rounds, sex columnist comes armed with advice
In the 1960s, Masters and Johnson moved the study of sex away from the anecdotal and into the scientific realm: they...
Winter 2004
Stressing the human touch in health care
When Anna Quindlen told a friend with AIDS she was giving a talk at the Yale School of Nursing, the friend said, “Tell...
Winter 2004
Fighting assumptions about the disabled, as well as bias
People assume that the nation’s estimated 50 million disabled people live lives of grim struggle, says Harriet McBryde...
Winter 2004
On eating well, and bringing values to the table
The family meal was once the central civilizing activity in a child’s life, says Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse,...
Autumn 2003
From workbench to bedside: an inventor’s tale
Dean Kamen’s portfolio of medical inventions ranges from infusion pumps to home dialysis machines to the iBOT, a...
Autumn 2003
The human genome—more than a list
Among the estimated 30,000 human genes are more than 250 genes that are implicated in oncogenesis. That, according to...
Autumn 2003
From Seattle to Botswana, partnering to fight AIDS
For nearly three years Merck & Co., the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the government of Botswana have worked...
Autumn 2003
Using genomics to craft a safer pharmacopeia
Every year some prescriptions go awry, causing the deaths of about 100,000 patients from toxic responses to...
Summer 2003
From pigs, the possibility of replacement tissue
With donor organs unavailable for most of the 80,000 people awaiting transplants in the United States, scientists are...
Summer 2003
An advocate for access, for all
As a child Tomas Lagerwall paid a visit to a “cripple center” in his native Sweden. “I remember seeing all those people...
Summer 2003
In medicine, a spiritual crisis
Medical science has, in the last century and a half, permitted miracles unimaginable in the day of Hippocrates, says...
Summer 2003
Giving names to the dead in the wake of 9/11
As the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City began processing the victims of 9/11, a fundamental...
Spring 2003
“There is no closure. There’s an opening. —”
Accompanying someone on the journey toward death is “an incredible luxury,” said Nancy H. Cobb, speaking at a lecture...
Spring 2003
Nailing down the language of stem cell biology
Two words that rarely pass the lips of Irving L. Weissman, M.D., in public are “embryo” and “clone.” He has reason for...
Spring 2003
A tragedy of HIV exposure in rural China
Last August, Chinese authorities detained a mild-mannered, bespectacled physician named Wan Yan Hai and held him for...
Spring 2003
A structure to accommodate therapeutic cloning
Following close behind biomedical advances are moral quandaries, said Francis Fukuyama, Ph.D., a political scientist at...
Winter 2003
A question worth answering: why don’t cancer cells die?
When cells become cancerous, they grow unrestrained and sometimes ignore signals that would normally induce them to...
Winter 2003
A disheartening view of AIDS in South Africa
“I will give you a picture that will sound a bit bleak,” Maria C. Marchetti-Mercer, Ph.D., told an audience at a lunch...
Winter 2003
African dust brings nutrients—and toxins
For centuries winds have carried dust from Africa and deposited it on islands in the Caribbean and locations in Florida...
Winter 2003
In history of birth control, a male influence
Although birth control is widely viewed as a women’s issue, men have played a large, if unrecognized, role in...
Autumn 2002
“If you’re not going to ban them … ”
Past efforts to make a “safer” cigarette, attorney Scott D. Ballin told the audience at a seminar at the Institution...
Autumn 2002
“If not you, who? If not now, when?”
Phill Wilson, the keynote speaker at this year’s AIDS Science Day, got the most applause when he exhorted his audience...
Autumn 2002
Drawing on native culture in medical practice
For Melvina McCabe, M.D., the diversity of cultures found in the United States is a double-edged sword, a source of...
Autumn 2002
Making the case for better newborn screening
During a visit to the School of Medicine in August, U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd couldn’t resist showing his audience a...
Summer 2002
Attacking a tumor's longevity via telomerase
Telomerase, the protein that keeps cells alive by adding new bits of DNA to chromosomes, may be a target for treatment...
Summer 2002
Smallpox an unlikely threat, syas Horstmann lecturer
When smallpox reached the New World, it quickly decimated the indigenous population, said John M. Neff, M.D., professor...
Summer 2002
From the right, a different take on bias in medicine
The same day that Sally Satel, HS ’88, spoke on political correctness at the medical school, an Institute of Medicine...
Summer 2002
Technology as a weapon against suffering
During his 28 years as a biomedical engineer, Robert S. Langer, Sc.D., has received four honorary doctorates, published...
Summer 2002
Linking HIV care to socioeconomics
Many interventions aimed at stemming the spread of AIDS miss the point, says Tom Peterman, M.D., chief of the...
Spring 2002
Immersing himself in Cushing’s “harem”
Out of earshot, the women who worked for Harvey W. Cushing, M.D., referred to themselves as “the harem.” The “chief,”...
Spring 2002
In genomics, the end of the beginning?
At the very least, the Human Genome Project was a technical and scientific challenge; it’s no simple matter to sequence...
Spring 2002
Nurse warns against repeating Tuskegee abuses
The last living health care provider involved in the infamous Tuskegee experiment, which followed African-American men...
Spring 2002
The world’s biggest country, and biggest market
If you wanted to find one place with some of the thorniest issues confronting biotechnology, you’d need look no further...
Winter 2002
Keeping values alive in the marketplace
Most social institutions, according to Samuel O. Thier, M.D., former chair of the Department of Medicine and now CEO of...
Winter 2002
Getting it right for The Times, and in a hurry
Journalists who cover medicine must do so under severe time constraints and often under pressure from people hoping to...
Winter 2002
“On the threshold of a gigantic new technology”
“One can be sobered by the realization that virtually all the earlier technologies of our species—stonework,...
Winter 2002
With global health, “There is no them, only us”
When anthrax scares put Americans on edge last fall, public health took center stage as a national security matter,...
Autumn 2001
A hub for health care
Schools can provide access to health care for children who might not otherwise see a doctor, former U.S. Surgeon...
Autumn 2001
Guarding against germ warfare
When federal officials simulated a bioterrorist attack on Denver, Colo., last year, “the city was lost,” said Alan S....
Autumn 2001
Racial disparities and community health
“The driving force behind racial inequality in health,” said David R. Williams, Ph.D., “is the economic circumstances...
Autumn 2001
Healing outside the box
When Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., spoke at the Yale Cancer Center in May about the will to live, she touched more than...
Summer 2001
Patterns of the AIDS epidemic
With globalization of the world’s economy making the transfer of money, people and products easier, drugs and disease...
Summer 2001
Cold War qualms spawned bioethics
When Nazi war criminals were put on trial in Nuremberg for performing medical experiments on concentration camp...
Summer 2001
Nimble bugs outmaneuver slow-moving humans
In the battle against infectious disease, microbes have the upper hand, said Joshua Lederberg, Ph.D. ’47, who shared...
Summer 2001
When physicians meet the press
“With added [academic] degrees, something happens to one’s ability to speak English,” said Nancy L. Snyderman, M.D.,...
Spring 2001
A lesson while dying
The dying young men of Johnson City, Tenn., taught Abraham Verghese, M.D., something about the meaning of life. A...
Spring 2001
Clinical research "riddled with conflicts"
Protection of human subjects and the integrity of clinical trials are in jeopardy from the new economics of drug...
Spring 2001
The ethics of stem cell research
In 1838, before publishing his theory that tissue is made up of tiny particles he called cells, German physiologist...
Spring 2001
The healing power of music
Twenty-five years ago, Oliver Sacks, M.D., tore off his left quadriceps while mountaineering in Norway and was saved by...
Fall 2000 | Winter 2001
Another vote for women’s health research
Former New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro came to Yale in September with a message about the importance of the...
Fall 2000 | Winter 2001
Bridging cultural divides in medicine
“Reality,” says writer Anne Fadiman, “not only looks different to different people. It is different.” Her acclaimed...
Fall 2000 | Winter 2001
A toolbox for drug abuse treatment
Drug abuse has been linked to 72 risk factors, including individual, family and societal issues, according to Alan I....
Fall 2000 | Winter 2001
AIDS in Africa: treating the "untreatable"
“We cannot let a disease for which a treatment exists mow down millions and leave a continent of orphans,” said writer...
Summer 2000
An organizing principle for cancer therapeutics
As knowledge of the human genome advances, physicians are finding ways to tailor cancer prevention and treatment to...
Summer 2000
The uneven distribution of health care
Wealth is more concentrated in Latin America and poverty rates are four times those of countries with similar gross...
Summer 2000
Where Harley Street crosses Fleet
As editor of The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, Richard Horton, M.D., finds himself straddling two worlds....
Summer 2000
Communicating in the clinic, across cultures
Language and culture can come between patients and caregivers, sometimes with disastrous clinical consequences, said...
Fall 1999 | Winter 2000
A high-level visit, a warning on Medicare
Over the next 30 years, the elderly in the United States will increase from 40 million to 70 million. That simple...
Fall 1999 | Winter 2000
With the CEO of 'Genome, Inc'
Just over a year ago, biologist J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., launched a scientific race with the claim that his company,...
Fall 1999 | Winter 2000
An Icelander decodes the data
Discovered in the Middle Ages by Scandinavian explorers, Iceland offered its early settlers a harsh and barren...
Fall 1999 | Winter 2000
Brazelton urges support for parents
T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., one of the nation’s leading pediatricians and child development experts, urged physicians to...
Summer 1999
A case study in corporate resuscitation
Managed-care executive Norman C. Payson, M.D., described “The Rise, Collapse and Resurrection of Oxford Health Plans...
Summer 1999
Shades of gray in the human genome
Nobel laureate Baruch S. Blumberg, M.D., Ph.D., discussed environmental and genetic factors of the hepatitis B virus...
Summer 1999
“Lost Boys” author weighs in on Littleton
Access to weapons, violent role models in the media, spiritual emptiness and a history of trouble are among the risk...
Summer 1999
Biology’s new world
DNA sequencing and genome-mapping have moved biology into a new world where researchers try to keep pace with the...
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