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Produced by Osaka's Ono Pharmaceutical Co., the new suppository drug is based on one of the prostaglandins, hormone-like compounds once believed to originate in the male prostate gland. Researchers have long realized that certain prostaglandins could induce contractions in smooth muscles, including those of the womb. Soon doctors were using them to speed up labor in difficult births and to induce abortion when other techniques had failed, or seemed unsuitable. Yet such abortifacients (as these drugs are called) had serious shortcomings. Usually administered intravenously, they often caused stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and other physical problems. Thus...
...erudition, indignation, historical allusion and harmonic prose. His overture to a diatribe against the two-thirds Senate majority requirement for treaty approval: ''I don't know whether to start this piece with an American battleship dashing round the Horn in wartime, a biologist slicing the salivary gland of a female mosquito, a volcanic eruption killing 30,000 people . . . or the vote of the United States Senate last week on the Panama Canal...
...chemical restore lost or weakened memory? In reports to the journal Lancet, scientists suggest that a hormone found in the pituitary gland may have that effect. The remarkable mnemonic is vasopressin, which was previously known to help regulate the body's water content. The levels of vasopressin in the blood appear to decrease after about the age of 50, just when many people begin to complain of failing memories...
...important early warning sign of prostatic cancer has been recognized for 40 years: a marked rise in the bloodstream of an enzyme-acid phosphatase-produced by the prostate gland. As the disease progresses, the level continues to rise. The challenge has been to develop tests sensitive and reliable enough to detect the increase before the cancer spreads. Now. in a sudden spurt of research activity at several medical centers, at least two promising new techniques are being tested...
Some 90% of the prostatic cancers now discovered are diagnosed only after the malignancy has spread beyond the prostate gland. But concludes a New England Journal editorial, "The clear indication is that mass screening on the basis of a blood test alone can reverse this gloomy experience...