Maurice M. Pechet, HMS lecturer on medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, was a pioneering scientist and physician whose work in the 1950s helped lead to development of the now widely-used steroid Prednisone, died in his sleep from complications of pneumonia March 5 in his Cambridge home. He was 94.
The developers of a long-stalled laboratory building in Boston’s Longwood Medical Area have resumed construction of the $300 million project, part of a burst of development activity in the region’s health care sector.
Salmaan Keshavjee, HMS assistant professor of social medicine, wrote about the prevalence of tuberculosis and World TB Day that took place on Saturday.
Jim Yong Kim, currently the president of Dartmouth College and former chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS, has been nominated to be the next World Bank president.
Paul Farmer, the Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine and chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS, released a statement commenting on Jim Yong Kim’s recent nomination to lead the World Bank.
A new study has found that people born without a sense of smell experience higher social insecurity and are at increased risk of depression than those who have functioning olfaction. Eric Holbrook, HMS assistant professor of otology and laryngology at Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary, is quoted.
An international team headed by scientists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital has found that being exposed to germs early in life has long-lasting effects on a subset of immune cells. Richard Blumberg, HMS professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dennis Kasper, the William Ellery Channing Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, led the research. Dale Umetsu, the Prince Turki bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud Professor of Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston, is also quoted.
Families haveincreasingly been willing to have their loved ones’ face donated for transplant, according to BohdanPomahac, HMS assistant professor of surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Pomahac’s team of plastic and transplant surgeons performed the first full face transplant in the United States in March 2011.
An animal rights group has alleged that seven months ago, a primate death occurred at the New England Primate Research Center that should have been reported to federal regulators. HMS responded to the complaint with the explanation that there was a death at the center in August, but that the animal received appropriate care for a complication that was a known risk of an approved surgical procedure.
