Human Body

The other day we spent a few hours surfing the Net in our quest to learn more about health and the human body. First, we visited an exciting-sounding Web site--the "Wonderful Multicoloured Intestine Creator!"--and painted a "medically correct" image of the human bowel. (If you've ever wondered what an undulating colon looks like in fuchsia or turquoise, then http://www.urban75.com/Mag/shock1.html is the site for you. OK, so we didn't learn much here.

As convicted murderer John Paul Jernigan ate his last meal--two cheeseburgers and fries--in 1993, he couldn't have known that he would one day be a digital superstar. A little later, Jernigan was executed by the state of Texas. Before he died, he signed a donor consent authorizing scientific use of his body. Some speculated he wanted to do something of merit before he died.

In the largest study of chemical exposure ever conducted on human beings, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday that most American children and adults were carrying in their bodies dozens of pesticides and toxic compounds used in consumer products, many of them linked to potential health threats.

There may be no better outcome for a museum exhibition than being at once instructive and entertaining. One such is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's 60-odd-work charmer "From Head to Toe: Concepts of the Body in Twentieth Century Art." You get the idea from the very first grouping. It contrasts a classic work of high theoretical seriousness, Picasso's 1908 Cubist "Head of a Woman," with Alexandra Exter's 1926 "Evening Dress"--a male puppet who looks pretty tipsy.

Despite the midnight hour, Jim Kohn decided to top off a night at the opera with a visit to a museum. So -- decked out in a tuxedo -- the 41-year-old Los Angeles man very early Sunday caught the last act of the California Science Center's "Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies." Drawing more than 650,000 spectators since it opened in July, the collection of "plastinated" cadavers proved so popular that museum officials kept the doors open for the final 41 hours.

Humanity was born to run. More than by brain size or tool-making ability, the human species was set apart from its ancestors by the ability to jog mile after lung-stabbing mile with greater endurance than any other primate, according to research published today in the journal Nature. Indeed, human beings evolved as the cross-country stars of a primordial runner's world 2 million years before the advent of jogging shoes, tracksuits and arthroscopic knee surgery.

We were all, once upon a time, a cluster of stem cells. From those we grew, and all other cells in the body came to be. And as our bodies rise triumphant from daily wear and tear, intact and ready to face the world anew, it is a stock of stem cells that replenishes tissues worn by age, or lost to injury and disease. Researchers argue that stem cells show extraordinary potential for treating a broad variety of debilitating diseases--from Parkinson's to diabetes.

Researchers have identified a protein that lets people detect sour tastes, a sense scientists still don't fully understand. Researchers at UC San Diego led by neuroscientist Charles Zuker isolated a protein called PKD2L1. It is found in cells different from those known to let humans detect other tastes, such as sweetness and bitterness. The group altered mice so that they lacked PKD2L1 cells -- and the mice were unable to detect sour tastes.

A presidential advisory committee on Monday urged an end to the ban on federally funded research using human embryos, saying such research would enable scientists to more easily study stem cells--the earliest cells from which body organs are developed.

Government regulators told Johns Hopkins University on Monday that the school may resume medical research on humans, four days after the regulators halted such studies because of the death of a volunteer. Some studies will have to be reviewed first. The federal Office for Human Research Protection approved a plan reached with the university to correct deficiencies found after the June 2 death of a healthy 24-year-old during an asthma experiment.