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,” said Cushing biographer Michael Bliss, Ph.D., would not have been amused.

In a talk in the Historical Library of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library in February, Bliss, a historian at the University of Toronto and biographer of William Osler, said Cushing enjoyed a decidedly professional relationship with his female staff and was less than tender as a boss. He paid the women who worked as secretaries, histologist and photographer low wages and worked them long and irregular hours. He dictated up to 10,000 words a day, expected a high level of performance and seldom thanked anyone. Yet he also offered perks such as coveted football tickets, invitations to his home and even trips to Europe.

The most devoted of his assistants was Madeline Stanton, who followed him from Harvard to Yale, where she became director of the Historical Library. In one of her journal entries, Stanton wrote, “I shall be miserable, I am sure, if I ever have to work with anyone else.” Bliss’s biography of Cushing is due out in 2006.

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 3 billion pairs of DNA, as the project’s public consortium set out to do in 1990. But the solution to the puzzle was in many ways not a technical one, Robert L. Nussbaum, M.D., said in a visit to the medical school in January. “It became very clear early on that this project was never going to work unless everyone did just a few things over and over again, really, really well,” said Nussbaum, chief of the genetic disease research branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute. “It was the introduction of management and organizational techniques from outside of science that probably made the biggest difference.” Nussbaum said a debate is now brewing within the institute on whether to declare the project over next April, an even 50 years after Watson and Crick’s description of the double-helix structure of DNA, by which time it is believed the final sequence will be assembled. “Should we declare it complete in 2003 and pack up and go home? Some say yes,” he said. “The others take the more Churchillian view that this is neither the end, nor the beginning of the end, but rather the end of the beginning—that we have now launched a whole new field called genomic science, and let’s get started.”

Nurse warns against repeating Tuskegee abuses

The last living health care provider involved in the infamous Tuskegee experiment, which followed African-American men with syphilis for 40 years while withholding treatment from a fraction of the cohort, warns that the American public needs to remain alert to comparable abuses that still exist. “I’m concerned that this is still going on,” said Mary Starke Harper, R.N., Ph.D., a student nurse during the research at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. She spoke of her experiences on February 18 as part of the Black History Month commemoration at the School of Nursing. Harper, 82, known nationally and internationally as a patient-care advocate and research consultant in geriatric psychiatry, said that neither she nor the two registered nurses with whom she worked at the time knew which patients were in the experimental control group. The study became a symbol of racism in medicine, ethical misconduct in human research and government abuse of the vulnerable, and led to the National Research Act of 1974.

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 than China. With more than a fifth of the world’s people living inside its borders, China has an enormous market for food and drugs, as well as an emerging biotech industry and venture capitalists. And it faces serious problems as it applies biotechnology to agriculture and pharmaceuticals.

The country’s pharmaceutical industry lacks original discoveries in its portfolio and, said Zhangliang Chen, Ph.D., director of China’s National Laboratory of Protein Engineering and Plant Genetic Engineering, “You have 20 companies producing the same drug.” In a talk in December sponsored by the Peking-Yale Joint Center for Plant Molecular Genetics and Agro-biotechnology, Chen said China is also producing genetically modified foods—which he believes to be the most efficient way to produce food in poor countries, despite controversy over their safety. “If we use organic agriculture in China,” he said, “many people are going to die because of starvation.”