If the 1995 stroke that paralyzed Jean-Dominique Bauby was cruelly premature, at least death had the courtesy to wait until the 45-year-old French journalist finished his last assignment. Less than 72 hours after readers and critics alike hailed as a triumph his memoir of living with locked-in syndrome--a state of virtually total paralysis that leaves the victim, in Bauby's words, "like a mind in a jar"--the former editor in chief of French Elle magazine died. Bauby's book Le Scaphandre et ...

The Vietnam War has claimed its victims in various dreadful ways, but the death last week of Lewis B. Puller Jr. seemed particularly haunting. Puller, the son of the most decorated member of the Marine Corps in its history, served in Vietnam as a Marine combat leader. Both his legs and part of his hands were blown off when he stepped on a booby trap. He lived, and he became an attorney at the Pentagon and a respected veterans activist. ...

Lisa Diebold, 22, has two goals for her senior year at Syracuse University: "Learn how to drive a stick shift, and drink a guy under the table." The pert advertising major has nearly mastered her first objective. She now darts about the hilly campus in her white Volkswagen Golf. The second is giving her a bit more trouble. One Friday night, after drinking close to two pitchers of beer, she had a screaming fight with her boyfriend and put her ...

The women's hospital at the University of Wrzburg used to be the biggest of its kind in Germany. Its former size is part of the historical burden it carries — countless women were involuntarily sterilized here when it stood in the geographical center of Nazi Germany. Today, the capacity of the historical building overlooking the college town, where the baroque and mid-20th-century concrete stand in a jarring mix, has been downsized considerably. And the experiments within its walls ...

The great transition was taking place without violence. Across the land, veterans of World War II tried to make the best of this best of all civilian worlds. In The Bronx, ex-Pfc. Peter Boucouvales, paralyzed from the waist down by the bullet which had lodged in his neck, lay between clean sheets in the Veterans Administration Hospital. The corridors were cheerless, the windows dirty. His lunch of filet of sole, peas, rice, cole slaw and lemon pie was cold by ...

Food, of course, is a necessary ingredient for good health. But is it more than that? Can eating the right foods in the right combination actually prevent disease? In the past few years, research on the subject has exploded. Scientists have started to identify what may be hundreds--even thousands--of natural chemicals in foods that seem to have preventive powers. These aren't just vitamins and minerals but a whole new bouquet of strange-sounding compounds--starting with the latest nutritional superstars, the phytochemicals. ...

The best way to understand a disease is to get at its root cause, and most of the time, that means hunting down the genes that trigger it. In three papers published this week, researchers report that they have identified two new genes that may contribute to the immune disorder multiple sclerosis . The hope is that the discovery will someday lead to the development of more efficient and much-needed MS drugs, as today's therapies carry serious ...

At the Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, England, in March 2002, doctors wheeled Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, into an operating theater for what has to be one of the world's only cases of elective neurosurgery on a healthy patient. Warwick belongs to a rare breed of scientists who experiment on themselves. He had volunteered to go under the knife so surgeons could hammer a silicon chip with 100 spiked electrodes directly into his ...

While authorities in Japan work desperately to prevent a nuclear catastrophe, on the other side of the world in Germany, Angela Merkel is facing the political fallout. With an important election in the southern state of Baden-Wrttemberg being held on March 27, Merkel's future as Chancellor could be decided at kitchen tables like the one in the modest Stuttgart home of Hanna and Volker Schwerteck. The young middle-class couple has plenty of reasons to back Merkel's Christian ...

Women Who Don't Realize They're Pregnant How can you not know that you’re pregnant? Missed periods, nausea, ballooning belly — then all that tickling and kicking and shoving inside you. Well, quite easily, as it turns out. Studies in Germany and Ireland have revealed that one baby in around 600 is born to women who were apparently unaware of their pregnancy until very late or when they were actually in labor. Beth Jeffrey discovered she was 25 weeks pregnant a week before her ...