Word: turek
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What really gets Turek roiled is that many of these sensational claims are being made by doctors and scientists who ought to know better. So last week he took aim at those colleagues in the research journal Nature. "There has always been, and probably always will be, public enthusiasm for quick snake-oil cures to complex problems," Turek wrote. But some melatonin researchers, he added, have stepped over "the truth-in-advertisement line by exaggerating the significance of a few selected studies to the point where the public receives an unbalanced and potentially dangerous view of the present state...
...WANTS TO BELIEVE IN THE health benefits of melatonin more than Fred Turek. A neurobiologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, Turek has devoted two decades of his life to studying this naturally occurring substance produced by the pineal gland. He feels certain that it functions as the body's own safe and highly effective sleeping potion. But lately Turek can't shake the feeling that the world has gone melatonin mad. Based on the flimsiest scientific evidence, the subject of his research is now being trumpeted in books and magazines and on television as a cure for everything from...
There's only one problem with that explanation, according to Turek. The strains of mice used in those studies do not produce melatonin. So whatever rejuvenated the aging rodents, it wasn't melatonin. "We didn't measure melatonin in the animals," Regelson concedes. "We didn't have the equipment at the time." Still, he dismisses Turek's objections, arguing, "If it isn't melatonin, what...