Eye On Medicine
Take a second look at the most compelling images from the opening pages of past issues of Proto.
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POLIO HAS RESURFACED in central Minnesota, 27 years after the last case in the United States was seen. Officials are trying to piece together how an eight-month-old Amish girl and four other children acquired the virus this past fall. Dr. Susan Rutten (shown making a house call) thinks the Amish, who often choose not to get vaccinated, have acquired the infectious disease either from traveling outside the United States or from contact with a foreign visitor. ‘If polio is in this community,’ says Rutten, ‘I guarantee it's in other parts of the country.’
(INGRID YOUNG/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
HYGIENIC, COMFORTABLE, EVEN FETCHING—all are necessary traits of modern scrubs, which must not only neutralize white light and make blood and tissue stand out in operating rooms but must also look good on TV (which is why sky blue is the hue of choice for medical training videos and prime-time hospital dramas). While other standards like misty green and magenta may indicate the wearer’srole, department or even size, the psychedelic prints worn by some staffers mark them merely as...colorful.
(ANNA WILLIAMS FOR PROTO)
TEEMING WITH MILLIONS OF SPECIES, coral reefs provide astoundingly fertile ground for the discovery of molecules and, in turn, drugs. Such organisms as Caribbean sponges and cone-shell snails have yielded molecules that show promise in aiding research of such diseases as Alzheimer’s and cancer. As such earthly ailments as Staphylococcus and tuberculosis become resistant to antibiotics, coral reefs—and the oceans at large—are becoming an ever more important biomedical resource.
(DAVID DOUBILET)
REGRET—that’s what many people with tattoos eventually feel about their body art. Yet the only recourse is a series of laser treatments that leave scars. Doing nothing is not appealing either: Inks include carcinogens such as industrial-grade carbon black and compounds found in auto-body paint. For those whose body art is still on the drawing board, Rox Anderson, director of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital, has invented bio-resorbable ink encased in polymer beads that burst and disappear after a single treatment.
(SHERI GABLIN)
MASTER OF DISGUISE—For 15 years, Robert Barron created masks for the Central Intelligence Agency, helping agents disappear into the shadows. Since his retirement in 1993, he has used his talent for a different purpose: bringing men, women and children disfigured by trauma, disease and congenital defects out from hiding. Made of silicone and painstakingly hand painted, Barron’s removable prosthetic ears, noses, fingers and faces—held in place by magnets, adhesives or screws—are nothing short of transformational.
(TIM SLOAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
DURING A FORMULA ONE PIT STOP, there’s no room for mistakes as the crew pitches in with practiced precision. Surgeons at London’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, after calling in a Ferrari team for a critique, devised a protocol to smooth the transition from operating room to intensive care unit, when a forgotten message about a vital statistic or an unprepared piece of equipment could cost a patient’s life. The changes, ranging from banning inessential chatter to disconnecting wires in a specific order, have noticeably cut errors.
(HANS NELEMAN/GETTY IMAGES)
CHILD’S PLAY is the unlikely solution to a sub-Saharan public health crisis: the high incidence of disease transmitted by dirty water. With each rotation of a PlayPump’s colorful merry-go-round, children draw clean water from 330-foot-deep wells into 660-gallon storage tanks that feature space for advertisements and public health messages about such concerns as HIV/AIDS prevention and proper hand-washing. The ad revenues fund the maintenance of the $14,000 system.
(GIDEON MENDEL/CORBIS FOR PROTO)
BODY IMAGE: Scientists at the University of Calgary gave new meaning to the term when they unveiled CAVEman, a computer-generated hologram that can display any combination of 3,000 human body parts (such as teeth or individual layers of skin) in ultrasharp resolution. CAVEman (so named because it lives in a CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment—a virtual reality theater) assumes four dimensions: the usual three for space, plus time, allowing researchers to watch the progression of conditions (such as tumor growth) and track the effects of potential treatments.
(MASUMI YAJIMA/UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY)
AFTER A TERRORIST ATTACK, it seems to photographer Diane Covert, victims are forgotten in the rash of questions. For her exhibit “Inside Terrorism: The X-Ray Project,” Covert collected images from two medical centers in Jerusalem and transferred them to Duratrans film so they could be viewed in daylight. Here, a watch partially severed the victim’s carotid artery.
(DIANE COVERT; THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS IN THIS EXHIBIT WERE PROVIDED BY HADASSAH EIN KEREM MEDICAL CENTER AND SHAARE ZEDEK MEDICAL CENTER, BOTH IN JERUSALEM. “THE X-RAY PROJECT” IS PARTIALLY SUPPORTED BY THE DAVID PROJECT)
CENTURIES OF HUMAN BREEDING created this dappled steed’s striking look, but its beauty comes at a cost. Research by Swedish geneticists on eight breeds of horses (including Icelandic and Arabian) has shown that the mutation in a gene group that causes horses to become gray, and eventually white, also leaves them vulnerable to melanoma, which may lead to premature death. Because humans and horses share this gene group, Australian scientists looked into whether common variants in the group cause susceptibility to melanoma in humans and found no risk.
(MARK J. BARRETT)
IN JULY, THE ONE-MILLIONTH ”long-lasting insecticide-treated mosquito net“ was distributed in southern Sudan. The nets, draped around sleeping areas, kill female anopheles mosquitoes, the prime carriers of malaria. By eliminating insects in one home, the nets can reduce the overall number of mosquitoes in an area, even in nearby homes without nets. Along with artemisinin-based combination therapies and the spraying of insecticide indoors, the nets have contributed to a 50% decline in malaria incidence and deaths in 29 nations during the past seven years.
(MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
A DANCE OF MUSICAL COLOR is what Wassily Kandinsky aimed to portray in Three Riders in Red, Blue and Black (1911), a woodcut inspired by the artist’s neurological condition—synesthesia—in which the perceiver can “see” sounds or “taste” words. Now an Oxford University study has linked the condition to four regions of the genome, including two chromosomes that are associated with autism and dyslexia.
(COURTESY OF MCMASTER UNIVERSITY COLLECTION, HAMILTON, ONTARIO, CANADA; DIGITAL IMAGE: ROY TIMM PHOTOGRAPHY)
NO PRESCRIPTION IS NECESSARY for a special pair of eyeglasses called Adspecs (short for adaptive spectacles). Their sturdy plastic frames encase flexible, oil-filled membranes that change refractive power as the wearer pumps oil in or out with a syringe. Manufactured for $19 a pair, Adspecs are a boon in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where there is one optometrist for every million people. With Adspecs, wearers need only an eye chart to fine-tune their vision.
(MICHAEL LEWIS/GUARDIAN NEWS & MEDIA LTD.)
PLASTIC TIPS ON SHOELACES—that’s the analogy often used to describe telomeres, molecular caps that protect chromosomes from fraying during cell division, which play roles in aging and cancer. For research about these tiny structures, Jack W. Szostak of Massachusetts General Hospital, Elizabeth H. Blackburn of the University of California at San Francisco and Carol W. Greider of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Read ’s Summer 2008 feature on the work here.
(HOLLY LINDEM FOR PROTO)
AN AILMENT THAT USUALLY STRIKES during ages of opulence now afflicts 5.1 million Americans. The return of gout, which is caused by uric acid crystallizing in the joints, is linked with the obesity epidemic. Though gout has been around for millennia, the condition is still often underdiagnosed and mismanaged—more’s the pity, now that the FDA has approved Uloric (febuxostat), which lowers uric acid more effectively than previous treatments.
(JAMES GILLRAY; PRINT COLLECTION, MIRIAM AND IRA D. WALLACH DIVISION OF ART, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS )
SMALL BLOOD VESSELS under a microscope look strikingly similar to cotton candy. So observed graduate student Leon Bellan while working with plastic surgeon Jason Spector on a major problem involving tissue engineering: A skin graft often dies because it can’t generate blood vessels quickly. The two researchers and their team used a cotton candy machine to make the wispy treat, then coated it in a polymer and dissolved the sugar, leaving microchannels that could serve as scaffolding on which to grow tissue implants.
(© Simon Colmer and Abby Rex / Alamy)
TAKING HIT AFTER HIT can exact a heavy toll well after a player has left the gridiron: in a 2009 study of retired NFL players, Boston University researchers found that multiple concussions often lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is marked by paranoia, depression and aggression. Quarterbacks are at particularly high risk of concussion, the brain forced against the skull at a force as great as 100 Gs (the equivalent of being slammed against the windshield of a car that’s traveling at 25 mph—twice).
(© Mike Powell/Corbis)
A “TRUE SUPERBUG” is what researchers worry a drug-resistant strain of Escherichia coli could become. The diarrhea-causing, sometimes-fatal bacteria—here, supersized 500,000 times in a three-foot-long glass sculpture created by artist Luke Jerram with the help of virologists and glassblowers—is typically treated with antibiotics. But research recently published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases found that, among 1,600 U.S. patients afflicted by the bug in 2007, the ST131 strain caused as many as 69% of the infections that were resistant to the main antibiotics used to treat E. coli.
(Luke Jerram)
IN PIETER BRUEGEL’S CHILLING “The Triumph of Death,” painted circa 1562, skeleton armies march across the land, sparing neither peasant nor prince from the plague that killed millions in medieval Europe. By analyzing DNA and proteins in victims exhumed from mass graves, researchers recently confirmed that the bacterium Yersinia pestis caused the Black Death. Other researchers studied the genetics of Y. pestis strains around the world to find that it originated in Central Asia, then made its way to Europe via flea-infested rats traveling along the Silk Road.
(© The Art Archive/Corbis)
QUARANTINE was one of many turn-of-the-century efforts to corral smallpox, as at this camp on St. John’s Island, off Singapore. The virus that once infected an estimated 50 million people a year with smallpox remains captive in two reserves, in Atlanta and central Russia. In May, World Health Organization delegates voted to delay deciding on whether to destroy the stores. Those in favor of destruction say that despite security at sites where the virus is kept, the world would be safer with the pathogen gone. Opponents argue that there may be hidden reserves that bioterrorists could exploit, and thus a small amount should be maintained to develop a more effective vaccine.
(Wellcome Library London)
