Rock me Jamadeus!

Girl's circumcision was mutilation, prosecutor says

2006-10-25T13:53:00.000-07:00

LAWRENCEVILLE, Georgia (AP) -- Prosecutors say an Ethiopian man circumcised his 2-year-old daughter with a pair of scissors to avoid bringing shame on his family.The defense blames his wife, her mother and a nasty divorce case.Khalid Adem, who is on trial this week in Gwinnett County, Georgia, could face 40 years in prison if convicted.Assistant District Attorney Marty First acknowledged that Adem, who was born in Ethiopia, is from a culture that practices female circumcision."But circumcision is just a nice way of saying mutilation," First told the jury of seven women and five men on Tuesday.

Doctor accused of giving stripper a hand

2006-09-19T14:43:00.000-07:00

A doctor has pleaded not guilty to stealing a hand from a New Jersey medical school cadaver and giving it to an exotic dancer, authorities said.Ahmed Rashed, a 2005 graduate of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, was charged Monday[...]The charge against Rashed carries up to 10 years in prison.

Ten years in prison for sneaking away with the hand of a cadaver? Sure, it may be weird, but the punishment is ludicrous. The exotic dancer kept it in her home, where it was part of her private anatomical collection.

Anyone who has taken an anatomy class with a dissection component knows the preponderance of jokes and pranks that tend to emerge when students are given access to a human corpse -- but most of the time, such horseplay is hidden from the public. And so we end up with hoopla like this.

A genuine concern, as a matter of policy, is that the existence of such cadaver "maltreatment" may discourage future donations of cadavers. That would be a bad thing for medical education and for society as a whole. So from the doctrine of compelling interest, the law may be right to take a stand. But I am not among those who, by some vague skittishness, consider this a deep violation of "ethics." At most, Rashed has broken an implied promise to the body donor and the donor's family, but this transgression hardly merits either national attention or 10 years in prison.

Here two undesirable remnants of the American "old culture" present themselves. Why has it received so much attention, and why is the law punishing a young physician for assisting a friend in producing an anatomical collection? I believe that the veiled assumptions behind this case are, indeed, medieval:

(1) The sanctity of the human body itself merits special consideration above other concerns.

(2) The fact that the recipient of the hand is an exotic dancer makes a difference, because exotic dancers are bad people. One imagines a greatly lessened degree of hubbub if the destination of the hand, were, instead, the personal anatomical collection of a Professor Emeritus of Surgery at UMDNJ.

Read more at www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/...

2006-09-15T22:13:00.000-07:00

Marco Polo, remixed: I'm going to China!
I've just decided to compete in the International Dragon Boat Festival in Tianjin, China. I'll be there from ~Sept. 30-Oct. 9 -- stay tuned!

Only the Harvard team was invited to represent the U.S. at this race. Because this is such a great excuse to make my first trip to China, I will be missing an entire week of class. How much Mandarin can I learn in the next 2 weeks?

To learn more about Dragon Boating:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_boat

Synthesis of a minimal cell?

2006-09-15T21:55:00.000-07:00

Something cool from Harvard Med's own George Church: http://www.nature.com/msb/journal/v2/n1/full/msb4100090.html

In this free article, Forster and Church outline a plan to synthesize life. It's a good read, though it suffers from the speculative indulgences risked by any proposal of such ambition.

In a nutshell, Forster and Church claim that synthesizing a cell (we're talking about the stuff even Frankenstein couldn't get funded!) will be useful for understanding "minimal" biology and developing drugs. Moreover, it will not be that hard. We know a lot already.

The first synthetic cell, in their proposal, will run off a DNA genome -- just RNA would work nicely and dispense with a lot of DNA-polymerase-related baggage, but it's probably not stable or robust enough. Cell will have a bilayer membrane WITHOUT membrane proteins (they are "dispensable") and about 150 genes. Basically, a gutted E. coli.

The biochemistry of all this is rather neat, and I can't wait to see the outcome of this idea.

For the precautionary-principle spoilsports out there: the authors do emphasize that any synthetic cell should be dependent on unstable and baroque laboratory reagents -- so that it supposedly would never be able to escape into the wild and wreak havoc. I've never been too worried about this one. But it does seem strange that Church doesn't mention the mutability of these ragtag synthetic cells -- which will probably be relatively high. Antibiotic resistance, anyone? Evolution works in mysterious ways. So let's think about it hard, not long.

Unnecessary buzz phrase of the day: "minimal translatome"

Death after two-hour ER wait ruled homicide - Sep 15, 2006

2006-09-15T15:20:00.000-07:00

www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/...

A coroner's jury has declared the death of a heart attack victim who spent almost two hours in a hospital waiting room to be a homicide.Beatrice Vance, 49, died of a heart attack, but the jury at a coroner's inquest ruled Thursday that her death also was "a result of gross deviations from the standard of care that a reasonable person would have exercised in this situation."A spokeswoman for Vista Medical Center in Waukegan, where Vance died July 29, declined to comment on the ruling. (Jury's findingsexternal link)Vance had waited almost two hours for a doctor to see her after complaining of classic heart attack symptoms -- nausea, shortness of breath and chest pains, Deputy Coroner Robert Barrett testified.

The practice of medicine becomes ever more dangerous for the provider. Whom should we prosecute for homicide? If you were in charge, whom would you hold liable for the death? From an ethical perspective, several options present themselves:

(1) The triage nurse, who misclassified the condition

(2) The hospital (corporation as person)

(3) The attending ER physician(s)

(4) The ER check-in nurses and personnel, who failed to note the gravity of the situation

(5) The victim's daughter, who failed to alert someone when her mother's condition deteriorated

In me humble, all of the above except (3) share some moral (and perhaps legal) culpability, only because at that stage no ER doc knew enough to have done anything to help. But who will take the heat? The nurse may be fired, but in the end the biggest victims will be Vance, Vance's family, and the hospital itself.

www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/...

2006-09-04T00:41:00.000-07:00

A flaneur in Princeton
Went down to Princeton a few weeks ago, by myself, for the first time since October 2005. I stayed only one night, but oh, did the memories run thick.

You know what? Sometimes the greenery of Prospect Gardens is company enough.

I've made myself a promise to visit more often.

2006-08-03T23:49:00.000-07:00

Welcome to something new.