Claudia Kalb

Go west, young scientist. Last week California offered its latest thumbs up to stem-cell research when Stanford announced it had received a $12 million anonymous donation to fund the new Institute for Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine.

It's not pretty out there. Last week a fourth cruise ship departing a U.S. port since October reported vomiting and diarrhea among passengers and crew. And a ship that had been cleaned after an initial outbreak, Carnival's Fascination, returned to land on Friday with a small new batch of victims.

Enter any health-food store and you will be overwhelmed by an alphabet of products promising menopausal relief. Black cohosh. Chasteberry. Dong quai. Licorice.

They are invisible--no bandages or scars--but the mental and physical pain of mood disorders can be unbearable. Anxiety overwhelms the mind with worry, fear and dread.

When the National Institutes of Health halted its trial of Prempro--the combination hormone therapy--in July, citing long-term risk factors, Susan Carroll threw away her drugs and hoped she'd escaped any harm.

Sick of the daily pill? You now have other options. And stay tuned: a version of the pill that limits periods to four times a year may be available in about a year.

It's a Thursday morning on the set of "ER" and actress Alex Kingston (Dr. Elizabeth Corday) is tripping over her lines. "I need 30 'migs' per kilo of methylprednisolone," she says, rushing to a gunshot victim. "Entry wound left mid-, sterno...

Ads for general Electric's new 4-D ultrasound promise to let you see your baby's face before it's born. Who wouldn't want one?But so far the "4-D" scans, which create high-resolution moving images, are available at only 300 sites nationwide. They're used mostly to spot problems in high-risk pregnancies. No insurer will cover, and no doctor should perform, a scan solely for your scrapbook. For now, if you and your fetus are healthy, you'll have to wait it out.

We all know that the nation's psyche was badly battered on September 11. But how badly? And for how long? Now researchers have quantified the scope of the problem.

No doubt you're confused about hormone-replacement therapy. And, like thousands of women who bombarded their doctors' offices and sent help! messages to Internet bulletin boards last week, you're probably wondering what to do.

Skin Cancer: With Temps Rising, So Are Rates Of This Deadly Disease. How Scientists Are Hunting For New Treatments--And Better Approaches To Prevention.

With an ever-growing array of sunscreen products, it's easy to get confused about what to buy. Some basics: SPF (sun protection factor) ratings apply to a band of ultraviolet light called UVB, the key culprit in skin cancer.

A Group Of Doctors Thinks Advances In Fertility Treatment Have Given Women Too Much Hope. Its New Ad Campaign Is Bound To Stir Up Public Controversy--And Private Anguish

OxyContin was developed to do good: relieve debilitating pain. But since the powerful drug debuted in 1996, it has become increasingly known for a dangerous side effect--the potential for serious addiction ("Playing With Painkillers," April 9, 2001).

Over The Past Decade, Doctors Have Focused New Energy On Managing Their Patients' Pain, And Sales Of Prescription Painkillers Have Tripled Since 1996. For Most People, These Drugs Are A Blessing. For Some, They're A Nightmare.

For more than a decade, Salt Lake City schools did as other schools did: they taught kids about drugs the DARE way. There were cops in the classroom, DARE T shirts and bumper stickers and the message "Just say no." But last summer, Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson lambasted DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) as "completely ineffective," canned the city's budget for it and booted it out of the schools.

On the 10th floor of Boston's Children's Hospital, Dr. Judah Folkman--a gentle presence with a racing mind--sits down to talk. He offers coffee and cookies.

Addicts know the pattern all too well--that roller-coaster ride of intoxicating highs and wasted lows. David Nott's journey has been one of the worst. At 28 he was a successful underwriter for Lloyds Insurance in London with a Porsche, a Ferrari and a country manor.

When Rita Lowitt, a Berkeley marriage and family therapist, isn't meeting clients in her office, she's treating them from home. Some nights, she might comfort a nervous new mom.

Two summers ago, Douglas Jenson was so wiped out from battling Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML) that he could do little more than sit by his window, watching the numbers on a thermometer rise and fall with the sun.

Ann Schneider has the spirit of a child--but a body succumbing to age. Her physical decline started 13 years ago, when she tripped and dislocated her hip.

When Dick Cheney left George Washington University Hospital only two days after his heart attack last week, at least one of the election's surprise headlines seemed to fade quickly.

When 260 physicists gathered for a recent conference at the University of Michigan, they chatted in their usual vocab: compactification, tachyon condensation, flop transition.

Four years ago aids researchers were ebullient about the development of powerful new drugs. Last week the more than 12,000 delegates gathered for the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, were more subdued.

All that stuff you've heard about how girls are ignored and oppressed and boys get all the attention in school? It's just a "myth," says philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers in her new book, "The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men." Girls are actually flourishing, says Sommers--boys are the ones in trouble.

At 5 feet 5 and 110 pounds, Amelia Greenberg was about as overweight as an earthworm. But last summer, as friends started dieting, she decided to lose five to 10 pounds.

When Joan Samuelson first traveled to Capitol Hill to lobby for Parkinson's research funding in 1991, nobody knew or cared much about the disease. The hearing rooms where she testified were small, the turnout spotty.

It's a cruel visual trick: you see someone in front of you, but you can't make out her features. Is it a friend? A stranger? Your own child? This is the heart-wrenching reality of severe age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

Ok, there are those dreaded pimples and that mess of raging hormones. But most American teens aren't battling the scourges of adulthood--cancer, heart disease, arthritis.

What a sexual past. They reveled in the birth-control pill, free love and premarital bliss. But today, baby boomers are edging unwillingly closer to their golden years and it's their sexual future they're thinking about--as in, "I have a sexual future, right?"There's no getting around the fact that sexual performance, interest and satisfaction can change over time. "Certain things go down with age," says John McKinlay, principal investigator of the Massachusetts Male Aging Study (MMAS), a major...