Shannon Brownlee

When Anne Dodge was twenty years old, food suddenly stopped agreeing with her. She would get hungry, she would eat, then a feeling like something gripping her stomach would come over her, and she would retreat to the bathroom to vomit. Suspecting a mental disorder, her primary-care physician referred her to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed […]

The company’s salvation lay just north of the stomach, with the condition Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease, or GERD. GERD occurs when the esophageal sphincter, the ring of muscle at the top of the stomach, allows acid to creep up the esophagus. Basically, GERD is chronic heartburn–heartburn so bad it can eventually damage the cells lining the […]

It is against this backdrop that Robert Graham, an eccentric millionaire inventor fromwhere else?Southern California, came up in the 1960s with the idea of a sperm bank devoted to spreading the seed of brilliant men. In 1980, when artificial insemination and anonymous sperm banks were becoming more popular, Graham founded the Repository for Germinal Choice, […]

But it was just three of Nemeroff’s many financial entanglements that caught the eye of Dr. Bernard J. Carroll last spring while reading a paper by the Emory doctor in the prominent scientific journal, Nature Neuroscience. In that article, Nemeroff and a co-author reviewed roughly two dozen experimental treatments for psychiatric disorders, opining that some […]

Today, Amgen is the world’s most successful biotechnology company, hailed regularly by Wall Street and the media as a shining example of the marriage between scientific ingenuity and the American entrepreneurial spirit. It is still headquartered in Thousand Oaks, Calif., the bedroom community of ranch houses and shopping malls an hour west of Los Angeles, […]

When the first baby conceived through cytoplasmic transfer was born in 1997, the press instantly hailed Cohen’s technique as yet another technological miracle. But four years later, the real story has proven somewhat more complicated. Last year, Cohen and his colleagues at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St. Barnabas, a New Jersey […]

These results seemed at the time to confirm the widely held view that medicine and its practitioners had lost their humanity, and that doctors were abandoning the patients who needed compassion the most. But the subsequent phase of the study called that conclusion into question. Here, dying patients entering the hospital were randomly assigned to […]