The Best Course for Troubled Veterans: Treatment, Not Jail

Sol Wachtler had a grim statistic to share with his audience: “After the Vietnam conflict, we had over 200,000 veterans who went to prison.” He added, “We’re determined to see that this doesn’t happen again.” Judge Wachtler, former Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, spoke during a panel discussion, sponsored by the Veterans Mental Health Coalition of New York City, at which speakers described efforts to steer nonviolent veteran offenders away from imprisonment and instead offer them support services and mental health treatment. One such program drew a good deal of attention: the Veterans Project, a groundbreaking North Shore-LIJ Health System initiative developed by Judge Wachtler, a lifetime North Shore-LIJ trustee. Read more [...]

Nursing Chief Leads Innovative Mount Sinai Research Partnership

Carol Porter, DNP, RN sees her role at Mount Sinai as “conveying the nurse’s perspective to the Medical Center, and vice versa.” As Mount Sinai’s Chief Nursing Officer – and recently appointed Associate Dean of Nursing Research and Education – she has been a strong advocate for the importance of nurses in both medical research and clinical practice. Read more [...]

The “Odd Couple” of Virus Research

It would be hard to find two more sharply contrasting individuals than Adolfo García-Sastre, Ph.D. and Peter Palese, Ph.D. In appearance, Dr. Palese is every bit the sober, buttoned-down man of science; Dr. García-Sastre, bearded and long-haired, looks more like a rock musician, and in fact has several shelves of music cassettes – everything from Bach to Meat Loaf – stacked inside his desk. The Spanish-born Dr. García-Sastre is also an amateur entomologist with an extensive insect collection, while Dr. Palese, a native of Austria, cheerfully admits to having “very few” interests outside of medicine. Read more [...]

New Hope for Millions of Men

Every year, across the United States, millions of men go into their doctors’ offices for a blood screening – the Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) test – to see if they are at risk for prostate cancer. The need for the test is clear: prostate cancer is the tenth-leading cause of cancer death in the U.S.; close to 200,000 men each year are found to have the disease, and more than 27,000 will die from it. One man in six will get prostate cancer during his lifetime, and for one man in 35 it will be fatal. Read more [...]

Windows into the Heart: The New Frontier of Coronary Disease Research

When asked about the impact of cardiovascular disease on world health, Jagat Narula, MD, PhD replies calmly but bluntly: “It is the most important scourge against mankind – the same for developing countries as for developed countries, and the same for men as for women.” Read more [...]

The Quiet Revolutionary

In 2007, Ihor Lemischka, Ph.D. was a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, where he had worked for more than two decades. His research in stem cell biology and its possible medical uses had brought him international renown. Read more [...]

“It’s Overwhelming to Hear Their Stories”

Every other week, Laura Hoskins, PsyD, leaves her practice at North Shore University Hospital and flies to upstate New York, where she immerses herself in the treatment of wounded Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans at the U.S. Army base Fort Drum. The work of Dr. Hoskins, a neuropsychologist, is part of an initiative under North Shore-LIJ’s Welcome Back Veterans program, a fund of the McCormick Foundation, in partnership with Major League Baseball. Dr. Hoskins spoke with Philip Berroll about her experiences: Read more [...]

A Second-Generation Success Story

As a child, Janice Gabrilove did not dream of a career in medicine – “I was thinking more of going into the performing arts,” she recalls. This is surprising, considering her family background: her father is Dr. J. Lester Gabrilove, a pioneering endocrinologist and a longtime leader of Mount Sinai’s Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Bone Disease (which is named for him and his late wife Hilda). Read more [...]

An Activist at Home and Abroad

Jeffrey S. Freed, MD, began his medical residency at Mount Sinai after graduating from public institutions where he had paid little or no tuition. “I had the good fortune to leave medical school with absolutely no debt,” he says. And Dr. Freed – a colorectal surgeon and Associate Clinical Professor of Surgery at Mount Sinai Medical School – has tried to aid students who are not so fortunate. As a member of the Mount Sinai Alumni Association, serving as Board President from 2001 to 2003, he has worked to make medical education affordable for those students “so that the onerous burden of debt does not impede their careers.” Read more [...]

Oliver Stone’s Nixon: The Politics of Resentment

When Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency, I was a college sophomore. His years in office overlapped most of my adolescence. Perhaps that was the reason -- beyond his conduct while in the White House -- that I hated him as I have not hated any other President, even Ronald Reagan, before or since. Most teenagers have a degree of hostility toward their fathers, and the President is the ultimate patriarch, Big Daddy to the nation. Certainly Nixon himself embraced that concept when he declared in 1972 that "the average American is like the child in the family." Read more [...]

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