Notebook

The American Medical Association (AMA), not to be outdone by the recent controversies surrounding sheep cloning, wrestled with a few ethical issues of its own earlier this month in Philadelphia. At a conference entitled "Ethics and American Medicine: History, Change, and Challenge," speakers tackled subjects such as end-of-life care and the problems of managed care and health-care rationing. The meeting’s concluding session, a roundtable discussion on medicine’s future ethical challenges, focused on the prospect of the genetics revolution reaching the bedside. Americans apparently are giving it some thought. While a recent AMA survey showed that three-fourths of Americans say they would be tested for specific genes, more than eight out of 10 are concerned about the privacy of genetic information. And well they should be, said Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. As the Human Genome Project leaps toward completion by approximately 2005, society faces questions on how it handles the new genetic information, Collins noted. Genetic tests for breast cancer, colon cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease are reaching the market, yet medicine currently can offer little in the way of preventing or in some cases treating these diseases, he explained. Those who take such tests fear both insurance and job discrimination. Collins also is concerned about both physicians’ and the public’s understanding of genetic testing. He wonders if they "can become genetically literate in time" for the coming onslaught of genetic information. Only a fraction of physicians, he told the audience, consider themselves well-informed about genetic disease and testing. GRATIFIED: Harvard’s James Gusella, a Faisal winner, has researched Huntington’s disease. Research into Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s diseases earned three scientists the 1997 King Faisal International Prize for medicine, awarded March 22 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. James F. Gusella, a neurogeneticist at Harvard Medical School, was cited for helping to map the gene locus for Huntington’s disease on human chromosome 4 and identifying the gene locus that encodes for the protein he termed Huntingtin. Neuropathologists Colin L. Masters of the University of Melbourne and the Medical Health Research Institute of Victoria in Australia and Konrad T. Beyreuther of the University of Heidelberg in Germany were recognized for advances in the molecular biology and chemistry of the abnormal amyloid tissue characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers hope these will lead to treatments that can interfere with pathological processes and eventually slow or cure the disease. Each of the three scientists received a gold medallion and is sharing a $200,000 cash prize. "Recognition is always nice," Gusella comments. "When you’re honored in a way that has compared the work you’ve done and the impact it has with that of others, and you come out near the top, it’s very gratifying." The King Faisal Prize for science, awarded this year for achievements in physics, went to Carl E. Wieman and Eric A. Cornell, who have dual appointments at of the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. They were honored for their work on new phases of matter at extremely low temperatures. They, too, received gold medallions and will split $200,000. INDECENT EXPOSURE? Material like this could be illegal under a disputed federal law. Earlier this month, the Washington, D.C.-based American Association of University Professors (AAUP) joined in filing a friend-of-the-court brief challenging restrictions to free speech on the Internet. The case, Janet Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, was argued before the United States Supreme Court on March 19. The brief was filed by organizations and individuals who post, view, or provide information on the Internet. They are concerned with provisions in the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 that would criminalize "indecent" and "patently offensive" postings in cyberspace, a move critics contend is unconstitutional. "The use of terms like that violates the First Amendment because they’re not susceptible to easy definitions," says Jonathan Alger, AAUP’s associate counsel. "There are all sorts of subjective judgments about what might be offensive to people.” The provisions could outlaw non- obscene postings related to sexual topics, as well as postings concerned with health, artistic, literary, and political issues. CDA "would have a chilling effect on professors and students who use the World Wide Web for teaching and research," Alger adds. The brief cites illustrations and discussions of breast cancer self-examination as examples of material that might be considered offensive and whose authors could be subject to prosecution. Other examples include the First Lady’s Sculpture Garden on the White House home page, and a physician statement on penile cancer located on OncoLink. The full brief is available online at http://www.shsl.com/. In its own brief, also filed this month, the Justice Department said CDA would not affect most educational and artistic material on the Web. X FILES: David Schlessinger’s team has made the most complete map to date of any human chromosome. Geneticists have created the most accurate physical map to date of the human chromosome X. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, led by David Schlessinger, a professor of molecular microbiology and genetics and director of the Center for Genetics in Medicine, have assembled a "high-resolution" map of 2,100 unique genetic landmarks, which is three times as many as previous maps. "This is essentially the first complete map for a [human] chromosome," says Schlessinger. The map, published in the March issue of Genome Research (R. Nagaraja et al., 7:210-22), has landmarks every 75,000 base pairs, surpassing the Human Genome Project’s (HGP’s) standards of every 100,000 pairs. But "even identifying all of the genes is only a starting point," Schlessinger notes. "This provides a direct route to sequencing," which is the next phase of the HGP, a $3 billion, 15-year international effort aimed at revealing the nature of the entire complement of working human genes. X is the chromosome that determines gender, with females carrying two copies and males only one. The map, which currently has some 2,300 genetic footprints, also is speeding the search for disease genes. "The X chromosome has always fascinated geneticists, especially because it’s the source of [many] genetic pathologies," he comments. The mapping project has helped the scientists nab disease genes for an overgrowth disorder known as Simpson-Golabi-Behmel syndrome and for ectodermal dysplasia, which blocks the development of hair follicles, sweat glands, and teeth. How to equitably distribute potential royalties from genetic resources that are found in Third World countries and developed by wealthier nations is a continual source of debate for science policymakers. However, a plant scientist from the University of California, Davis, has helped devise a plan to reroute possible economic benefits back to source nations. Pamela Ronald, an assistant professor of plant pathology at UC-Davis, along with John Barton, the George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford University, drafted a policy statement for the "Genetic Resources Recognition Fund." Ronald says that this is the first attempt by a university to compensate for inequities related to genetic sequences. The fund’s guidelines encourage any companies interested in licensing rights to a patented gene to contribute. Administered by UC-Davis, the fund will finance graduate fellowships at the university for students from countries where the genetic material originates. Using rice plants native to West Africa, Ronald isolated the Xa21 gene, the first cloned gene to convey disease resistance to rice. UC-Davis already has committed $50,000 of future royalties from Xa21 to the fund. Ronald says that two major agricultural firms—whose names she declines to divulge—have agreed to contribute tens of thousands of dollars. "The idea is to funnel potential profits back to the country where the germplasm originated," she remarks. "But you never know if your particular discovery is going to make any profit. I’m interested in getting more scientists to contribute to such a fund, so [that even] if only one or two genes make a profit, there’s going to be an ongoing fellowship fund." When he was a Johns Hopkins University medical fellow, Bruce L. Rollman had a very practical reason for helping study the marriages of more than 1,100 physicians who graduated from Johns Hopkins’ School of Medicine from 1948 through 1964. "At the time of my fellowship, I was single, and I thought I could learn what type of women to go for and what type to avoid," recalls Rollman, now an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Results of the study (B.L. Rollman et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 336:800-3, 1997) reveal that over 30 years of follow-up, the divorce rate was 51 percent for psychiatrists and 33 percent for surgeons. Twenty-four percent of internists, 22 percent of pediatricians and pathologists, and 31 percent of other specialists split up. When all factors were adjusted, physicians’ anxiety and depression level were found to have little effect on divorce rates. Rollman offers some caveats: The study sample was overwhelmingly white and male, while today’s medical student population is far more diverse. In addition, there was no information on the quality of marriage. Rollman suggests that specialists in fields with higher divorce rates may want to seek counseling sooner rather than later, and that professional medical organizations consider offering such counseling as a benefit. Since working on the study, Rollman himself has married and is the father of a four-month-old daughter. "So far the story is ending happily," he observes. And his wife? "She’s glad she married an internist," Rollman reports. CABINET SHUFFLE: Former DOT head Federico Peña is the new U.S. Secretary of Energy. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) finally has a permanent head. The Senate on March 12 voted 99-1 to confirm Federico Peña as the new Secretary of Energy, ending a month-long stalemate between the White House and Senate Republicans. Peña, the Secretary of Transportation during President Clinton’s first term, is a lawyer by trade and a former mayor of Denver. Although he has no previous energy experience, legislators from both parties praised Peña as qualified, given his administrative successes at the Department of Transportation. here at DOE, Brookhaven National Laboratory director Nicholas P. Samios has announced he will relinquish his post effective April 30 to return to a research position at the laboratory. Some observers speculate that his retirement is linked to the discovery of a radioactive tritium leak beneath one of Brookhaven’s reactors, a leak that is at least three years old. However, Samios says his decision to step down was made a year ago, well before January’s discovery of the leak. April 30 marks the 15th anniversary of his appointment as Brookhaven director.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of