WebWeekly

May 7, 2001

In Print

Photo by Pam Murray
Focus:
From Mutation to Medication? Faulty Toxin Sabotages Anthrax Infection
A mutant form of an anthrax toxin subunit may become the basis for a new vaccine and therapy against the disease, say R. John Collier and his lab colleagues. They discovered that the mutant molecule completely inhibited anthrax poisoning in rats.
BBS Bulletin
HSTconnector
MedEd News
Mentations
On The Brain

Headlines

Women's Menstrual Cycle Holds Clue to Cocaine Response

Upcoming
The A. Clifford Barger Lecture:
The Antarctic Ozone Hole
Mario Molina, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thursday, May 17
5:00-6:00 p.m.

Call for Writers
Are you a student and a natural writer with few outlets for your creative mind and journalistic eye? Consider writing for Focus and WebWeekly. Several of our veteran columnists will be graduating this year so we're looking for MD and PhD students to fill their vacancies. The job requires producing three to six columns a year for the Forum section of Focus and Student Scene section of WebWeekly. Candidates must be skilled and motivated writers though do not have to be previously published. The biweekly Focus goes out to 18,000 faculty and staff across HMS and the affiliated hospitals, and every issue of WebWeekly receives thousands of visitors. If interested, please contact editor Robert Neal, 432-0448 or e-mail rneal@hms.harvard.edu.
Spotlight

Photo by Steve Gilbert
Patient Simulator Comes to Life in TMEC
This month in the Tosteson Medical Education Center, medical students in the Health Sciences and Technology PatientÐDoctor II course will meet Stan, the computer-controlled patient simulator. He breathes; his heart beats; his pupils dilate; and he shows all the normal vital signs. More important, in tutorial cases, he gives the students a chance to think on their feet.

Student Scene

Photo by Graham Ramsay Medical Tools Change the Nature of Death
As a resident at Children's Hospital, Ellen Rothman sees the way medical technology can prolong the life of very sick children, sometimes enabling them to recover and sometimes not. She has found that just the capacity to delay or allow death's arrival gives the physician a profound responsibility.