A Waiting Trial In the summer of 2006, Doug Bergman had a needle plunged into his heart 10 times for science. Now he has leukemia. By Ivan Oransky Photographs by John Borge Related Articles: Trial of the Heart Scientist to Watch: Amy Wagers - Setting the record straight Slideshow: A Waiting Trial When I knock on the door of room 733 of the MeritCare Roger Maris Cancer Center in Fargo, ND, Doug Bergman is sitting up in his bed. He's been expecting me, but it's n

var FO = { movie:"http://www.the-scientist.com/supplementary/flash/54072/54072.swf", width:"520", height:"580", majorversion:"8", build:"0", xi:"true"}; UFO.create(FO, "ufoDemo"); Slideshow: A Waiting Trial In October, Deputy Editor Ivan Oransky traveled to Fargo, North Dakota, to interview Doug Bergman in the hospital. Bergman had developed leukemia a little more than a year after taking part in a clinical trial of stem cells to repair his heart. (For a st

A leading child psychiatrist got thousands of emails this week criticizing a provocative advertising campaign by his center to raise awareness of mental illness in children. The New York Times linkurl:reported;http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/business/media/20child.html that Harold Koplewicz, the director of New York University's Child Study Center, received more than 3,000 emails in response to the ads, which used fake ransom notes to call attention to autism and depression in children. For e

The University of California, San Francisco fired dean David Kessler on Thursday, after he refused a request to resign earlier in the year. In linkurl:announcements;http://pub.ucsf.edu/today/cache/news/200712144.html about the firing on Friday, Kessler and the university noted that he had raised questions about the school's finances, but that the university had denied there were any improprieties. In June, the school asked him to step down by January 1, but he refused. After his firing, Kessle

Apparently, the punishment the World Health Organization (WHO) meted out to the New York Times for linkurl:breaking an embargo last week;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/53943/ didn't deter other media outlets from doing the same yesterday and today. Early this morning -- 4:28 EST, to be precise -- the WHO sent out a notice to its media list saying that an embargo on a story about children's medicines was being lifted immediately because it had been broken. I searched Google News for

Out of Mind When I was a medical student in the mid-1990s, many of the newer generation antipsychotics used to treat schizophrenia, such as risperidone and olanzapine, were just coming on the market. My psychiatry rotation was at the famed Bellevue Hospital in New York, and half of the unit to which I was assigned was filled with patients in clinical trials of many of those drugs. In many cases, these were double-blinded, placebo controlled trials, but that was a bit of a f

For the next two weeks, if you want news about the World Health Organization (WHO), you may have to consult sources other than __The New York Times__. According to an Email I just received from the WHO, the organization has suspended the __Times__ from its media distribution list for two weeks after the newspaper broke an embargo on a linkurl:story on measles deaths. ;http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/world/africa/29briefs-measles.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (They've dropped sharply, it turns out.) ''

I just got a press release that made me go ''huh?'' That's ''huh,'' question mark. Not ''huh!'', or ''huh,'' exclamation point -- which is what I like from press releases. If you don't see what I mean, answer me this: Does dandruff have a genome? According to the press release, from Procter & Gamble, it does. So I opened the Email to find out about this sequencing feat. It turns out, as you may have guessed, that scientists at Procter and Gamble Beauty had sequenced the genome of Malassezia glo

One of my favorite email digests I receive every day is from ProMEDmail, the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases. It's an endless source of story ideas, from linkurl:chikungunya;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23145/ to linkurl:bipartisan bacteria;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/15817/ to lab accidents. (Not to mention linkurl:pygmy rabbits.) ;http://www.promedmail.org/pls/askus/f?p=2400:1001:5828125031687364952::NO::F2400_P1001_BACK_PAGE,F2400_P1001_PUB_MAIL_ID:1000,

Readers who have been following my linkurl:coverage of attempts to save the endangered pygmy rabbit;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/daily/53232/ may remember linkurl:Onyx, ;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/53292/ a male rabbit I accompanied in April as his keepers moved him into temporary quarters to see how he would do in a ''prerelease setting.'' Onyx, who is 75% Columbia Basin rabbit and 25% Idaho rabbit -- the Columbia rabbits are officially endangered, and there has linkurl:be

Every now and then, I get an Email that makes me wonder whether people are idiots. OK, more than every now and then. Today, it was a job posting from a science writers' association that caught my eye. ''I am searching for a psychiatrist or psychologist, an expert in bipolar disorder, to write (or work with a writer to write) The Complete Idiot's Guide to Bipolar Disorder.'' Hmm, I thought. I earned an MD and then finished an internship in psychiatry. I'm a writer. If I had the time and the inc

In May, Bill Sharfman linkurl:wrote about;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/53253/ a London exhibit of works by John White, a 16th-century painter and traveler. They are of what might be considered well-known items: A pineapple, a plantain, and a Portuguese Man O' War. As Sharfman pointed out, however, "when White painted these images in 1585, they represented England's first glimpse of the flora and fauna of a mysterious body of land known as the Americas." That exhibit has now made it