Starting first with the last of the items in this post’s hed,  Andrew Pollack has a brief but eye-opening  yarn – about DNA evidence - floating in nowheresville without illus on p. 3 of today’s Science Times. I only had to read the story’s hed  DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show to slap my own head. In a flash I thought of all those recent stories on the plummeting price of individual genomes, the abundance of lickety-split DNA sequencers in biotech labs all over the place, and thought one thing: Crime Scene Investigation. Already, producers of the TV crimeshow CSI  franchises based in ‘Vegas, Miami, and NY must be sparring over who gets to have the first episode in which some rich evil genius criminal murderer rapist wreaks his felony – but only AFTER cooking up a synthetic version of somebody else’s DNA to splash around the crime scene. If the SNPs fit, you must convict, right?  Bring Grissom back. He’ll figure it out (the old methylation test).

   The section’s big story is Nicholas Wade’s update on those anti-aging, starvation-diet mimicking drugs that everybody was writing and reading about in the last few years, but now are seen in public mainly as topics of semi-fraudulent pitches from dietary supplement grifters. It is accompanied by a sidebar on fringe advertising excesses written by Sarah Arnquist.  Wade gives it a lively go. The story does not quite back up the hopeful air of the main illus – those two hands of remarkably similar size but of vastly different ages – but the body of the text keeps its balance. Wade clearly thinks something big is cooking, but he also explains that such things as resveratrol have been more hype than justified hope so far. One section on wild v. lab mice is telling. Wade mentions another line of research, which he calls single gene changes, but so briefly that this aspect might well have been better left out.

Other Headlines of Note:

• Cornelia Dean: Clash Over Rebirth of Mt. St. Helens ; A richly detailed profile of policy conflict on the skirts of a restive, homicidal volcano. They are a natural lab for studying how ecoystems respond to devastation. But it’s been nearly 30 years since the big blow. The snowmobilers and the hunting and fishing and second-home developing crowd is getting angry over all the fences and signs and guv’mint regulations and scientists with their precious data. Money is tight all around, too. Lovely illus.
• Benedict Carey: Mental Stress Training Is Planned for U.S. Soldiers ; On rising attention in the US military to emotional /psychological injuries and how to prevent them  (and resonant with the superb two-part report in the Times this week on the enthusiasm that seasoned commanders are surprised to find themselves feeling as women arrive for combat and do well.)
• Denise Gray : Healthy One Day, Dying the Next: A Medical Race ; Just another annals of medicine weeper, I thought. Then could NOT stop reading.
• Jane Brody: End-of-Life Issues Need to be Addressed ; Jeez, this or something like it should have been on the front page weeks ago at the first sigh of the deliberately concocted canard about “death panels” that has disgraced discussion of US health reform. (See Paul Raeburn’s pertinent post from yesterday)  End of life counseling is already part of the better private health plans. And chances of rationing care and cutting off grandma, someday, from heroic treatments are just as high with HMO corporate pencil pushers in charge as with government bureaucrats. Jane tackles it well and pointedly – and should have been put on the line of scrimmage a month ago.
• Tara Parker Pope: Weight Lifting May Help to Avert Lymph Problem ; It is hard to spend time around women who have undergone aggressive mastectomy and avoid the glared, accusatory question from the furious patients, “Why didn’t anybody tell me about this arm thing?!” That’s the blocked lymph flow that can leave women almost crippled in their use of both arms. Maybe, Pope writes, physical therapy can do a better job avoiding the problem.

As usual, lots more in Whole Section;

-CP

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