Word: frack
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Before Frick and Frack entered the English lexicon as a term for an inseparable pair of buffoons, it referred to a popular ice-skating comedy duo. Beginning in the late 1930s, Frick, Werner Groebli, and his partner, Frack, Hans Rudolph Mauch, performed some 15,000 shows incorporating a unique mixture of pantomime, physical comedy and athleticism. "People think our skating is eccentric. It's not so," Groebli told TIME during the pair's first U.S. tour, in 1939. "Any figure skater should be able to do a serious spread eagle"--in which he skates with his body bent backward nearly...
Here's a medical pop quiz: Frick and Frack are friends who sport matching spare tires around their waists. Frick goes to Weight Watchers and loses 30 lbs.; Frack goes to the ice-cream parlor and downs a triple banana split every day for a month. So who will live longer? Anybody with a clue about obesity knows that conscientious Frick has lowered his risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and stroke. Frack has done exactly the opposite...
...anyone who read last week's issue of the journal Tissue Engineering knows that Frack could someday have a big advantage if a new piece of research can be turned into a practical treatment. According to scientists at UCLA and the University of Pittsburgh, the unsightly flab many of us lug around is a previously unsuspected source of stem cells, a remarkably versatile class of cells that can in principle be transformed into a variety of body tissues. Researchers already suspect that stem cells found in fetuses and in the bone marrow and brains of adults might...
Unfortunately, these particular stem cells are already partly specialized, so they might not help Frack's hardened arteries or the insulin-producing cells in his pancreas (though other types of stem cells might). But in principle, he could mine his love handles for cells to repair his damaged liver, to replenish blood cells lost to disease, to fix a damaged heart or to repair missing or deteriorating cartilage. And because the cells would be drawn from his own body, Frack wouldn't have to worry about having his immune system reject them...
None of this means that Frack should be considered a role model, though. Stem-cell tissue replacement is half a decade off at least, and nobody knows what unexpected glitches might arise to make the whole idea impossible. Besides, the hazards of true obesity are enormous. But if the research pans out, it may someday be as prudent to carry a modest spare tire around your waist as it is to carry one in the trunk of your...