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While the ranking of colleges is an arbitrary business, necessarily imperfect and inherently subjective, we feel that if the U.S. News is going to continue its annual survey, its editors might as well find a way to reach the correct conclusions. Whatever can be said about Harvard's performance in the last year, the thought that it could be outdone by lesser schools in Connecticut and New Jersey is, well, preposterous...
Which version of events is correct? Since both plaques and tangles are found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, a number of clinicians suspect that tau and beta-amyloid may each play a role, though not necessarily in every patient. For in contrast to the simplistic thinking that dominated the Alzheimer's field only two decades ago, medical researchers now believe this common form of senile dementia is actually a cluster of diseases that, like diabetes and heart disease, may have more than one fundamental cause...
...strategies pharmaceutical firms are using in drug development for genetic disorders vary widely. If the gene defect results in a protein that does not function, says Myriad's Skolnick, "you would try to replace that function by introducing a correct version of the protein into the body. Or you would try to mimic the function of the missing protein with a synthetic compound...
...medical breakthroughs that have already had the deepest impact are those that enhance sight and mobility. Nationwide, more than a million cataract procedures are performed each year to correct clouding in the lens of the eye. Until 20 years ago, the main treatment was the removal of the patient's lens and its replacement with a thick pair of cataract glasses to correct his vision. Now ophthalmologists are able to implant a new, artificial lens behind the iris, a procedure that has become so routine that it is usually done on an outpatient basis...
Ultimately, scientists would like to figure out how genetic defects cause depression, and then to design drugs to correct whatever has gone awry. Gene mapping would be particularly helpful to people at risk for manic-depressive illness: although lithium and related drugs usually relieve the manic episodes, current antidepressants are often ineffective against the acute depressive ones. Says Ascher: "That's the real frontier...