President Obama has named three local professors — a biological oceanographer, a mathematician, and a biomedical engineer — as recipients of top national scientific awards. Robert Langer of MIT, who is also a senior lecturer on surgery at HMS, is one of the recipients.
Harvard Health Publications, the publishing arm of Harvard Medical School, is planning a series of short, original e-books on work, parenting, yoga and how to be a surgeon.
Areas in the country that spend more on new screening technologies such as digital mammography are seeing more women diagnosed in the early stages of breast cancer but no corresponding drop in late-stage breast cancer diagnoses, according to a new study. Leigh Simmons, HMS instructor in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Mara A. Schonberg, HMS assistant professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, are quoted.
Why we and other animals itch remains something of a mystery, but now researchers in the United States and several universities in China have found a key piece of the puzzle, identifying sensory neurons in mice that are dedicated to relaying itchy sensations from the top layers of skin to the spinal cord. Ethan A. Lerner, HMS associate professor of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, is quoted.
Legalization of marijuana takes health consumers into murky territory. Even though marijuana is the most commonly used illegal drug in the United States, questions about its health effects remain. A. Eden Evins, HMS associate professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, is quoted. Studies by Staci Gruber, HMS assistant professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital, are cited.
In November, the NIH announced that starting as soon as this spring, any investigator who receives a research grant from the NIH and publishes the results in a scientific journal must submit an electronic version of the final peer-reviewed manuscript to the government’s PubMed Central (PMC) repository to continue receiving federal funds. Scott Lapinski, digital resources and services librarian at the Countway Library of Medicine, is quoted.
Alexander Leaf, the Jackson Professor of Clinical Medicine, Emeritus, and a versatile physician and research scientist who was an early advocate of diet and exercise to prevent heart disease, died on Dec. 24 in Boston. He was 92.
When we remember our past selves, they seem quite different. We know how much our personalities and tastes have changed over the years. But when we look ahead, somehow we expect ourselves to stay the same, according to a team of psychologists, describing research they conducted of people’s self-perceptions. Daniel T. Gilbert, professor of psychology at FAS and Jordi Quoidbach, postdoctoral fellow in psychology at FAS, were two of the authors.
The federal office in charge of a massive rollout of electronic health records has issued a plan aimed at making those systems safer by encouraging providers to report problems to patient safety organizations. John Halamka, chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and HMS professor of medicine and Ashish Jha, HMS associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, are quoted.
