Thomas Friedman sits in on an "accent neutralization" class for Indian telephone workers who want to speak like Canadians. See "30 Little Turtles" in the New York Times.

"President Bush yesterday dismissed two members of his handpicked Council on Bioethics -- a scientist (Elizabeth Blackburn) and a moral philosopher (William May) who had been among the more outspoken advocates for research on human embryo cells." See "Bush Ejects Two From Bioethics Council" by Rick Weiss in The Washington Post.

"Women, the maker of Viagra has found, are a lot more complicated than men. After eight years of work and tests involving 3,000 women, Pfizer Inc. announced yesterday that it was abandoning its effort to prove that the impotence drug Viagra improves sexual function in women. The problem, Pfizer researchers found, is that men and women have a fundamentally different relationship between arousal and desire." Read "Pfizer Gives Up Testing Viagra on Women" by Gardiner Harris.

"In the 1980s, as Richard McNally relates, day care workers risked prosecution and imprisonment on the coerced testimony of bewildered and intimidated three-year-olds who were prodded to "remember" nonexistent molestations. Meanwhile, poorly trained social workers, reasoning that signs of sexual curiosity in children must be "behavioral memories" of rape, were charging parents with incest and consigning their stunned offspring to foster homes. And most remarkably, whole communities were frantically attempting to expose envisioned covens of Satan worshipers who were said, largely on the basis of hypnotically unlocked "memories," to be raising babies for sexual torture, ritual murder, and cannibal feasts around the patio grill." In "The Trauma Trap," Frederick Crews reviews Remembering Trauma by Richard McNally for The New York Review of Books.

Studies show that most doctors feel they can take advantage of the free offerings of the pharmaceutical companies without being influenced. "Regarding his own independence and integrity, my friend has no doubts. He feels that, as a man of science, he is trained to recognize an advertisement when he sees one, and to file it away in that corner of his brain reserved for potentially biased information," writes Dr. Abigail Zugar. See "When Your Doctor Goes to the Beach, You May Get Burned."

What is a soul? "Our own age remains quasi-Romantic in its attitude to the soul," writes Alain de Botton. "Though we no longer identify the word so clearly with art, we continue to think of the soul as something bound up with "feeling". Our soul is often held to be akin to our "true self", the sort of thing one might get close to through psychoanalysis or meditation." See "Our eternal self, whatever it is," a review of Imagining the Soul: A History by Rosalie Osmond in em>The Daily Telegraph.

"For the past seven years, John Sperling has quietly assembled an unorthodox team of researchers poised to use all relevant technology - including, ultimately, therapeutic cloning, stem cell medicine, and genetic engineering - to alleviate human suffering and the fear of death. Sperling oversees the effort by doling out funds from his own fortune." See Brian Alexander's "John Sperling Wants You to Live Forever, And he's Promising $3 billion to make it so" in Wired.

"Ethics missionaries are driven by the assumption that improving our moral lives is a matter of developing our conceptual understanding and analytical acumen. The fantasy seems to be that if up-and-coming accountants just knew a little more about ethics, then they would know better than to falsify their reports so as to drive up the value of company stock. But sheer ignorance is seldom the moral problem. More knowledge is not what is needed. Take it from Kierkegaard: The moral challenge is simply to abide by the knowledge that we already have." Gordon Marino explains in his article "Before Teaching Ethics, Stop Kidding Yourself," in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Is nanotechnology safe? "Now, realizing that public perception may be at a tipping point, the fledgling industry and government agencies are taking a novel tack, funding sociologists, philosophers and even ethicists to study the public's distrust of nano. Supporters of the approach say these experts will serve as the industry's conscience and ensure that the science moves forward responsibly. Others suspect it is an effort to defuse nano's critics." See "For Science, Nanotech Poses Big Unknowns" by Rick Weiss in The Washington Post.

"Profitable as 'big pharma' remains—Pfizer made twelve billion dollars last year—a deep sense of anxiety prevails in the industry. That’s because Merck is no exception: most drug companies have what’s known as a pipeline problem. That is, the patents on the drugs that are now making money for them are about to expire, and they don’t have enough new drugs in development. The number of 'new molecular entities' —drugs not yet introduced in the United States in any form—approved annually by the F.D.A. has fallen by sixty per cent since 1996, and new drug applications have dropped nearly forty per cent. What’s more, many of the drugs that are being invented are of the “me, too” variety—variants of existing drugs." Read James Surowiecki's "The Pipeline Problem" in The New Yorker.

"As four men pleaded not guilty yesterday in San Francisco to federal charges of supplying performance-enhancing drugs, one vital question remained unanswered: Exactly who are the dozens of football, baseball and track and field athletes who are accused of taking these illicit substances?" See "At Core of Drug Scandal, Names Are Missing" in The New York Times.

"Eli Lilly and Co. has been ordered not to accept new participants for local clinical trials of an anti-depressant and incontinence drug (duloxetine) after the weekend suicide of a teenage test subject. The Institutional Review Board that oversees all Lilly trials on the Indiana University medical school campus also decided Tuesday that the company must bring in an independent psychiatrist to evaluate participants." See "Suicide brings changes to Lilly drug trials" in the Indianapolis Star. See also articles in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

"While most bioethicists are no doubt well-intentioned, their work is sometimes being used as cover, allowing corporate conundrums to masquerade as ethical problems, often with solutions that serve corporate interests." See "Businesses are Buying the Ethics They Want" by Ray De Vries in The Washington Post.

"Believe it or not, erectile dysfunction used to be a taboo topic. Now it is so thoroughly a part of public discourse that it's possible to hold water-cooler debates over the Super Bowl ads of competing impotence treatments. This is the environment in which Cialis, a Viagra competitor and a joint venture of Eli Lilly and Icos, made its debut in the United States." See Rob Walker's report on Cialis in the New York Times Magazine.

"Mounting concerns over the safety of prescribing a new generation of anti-depressants to children and teenagers has prompted Health Canada to issue a rare public warning to reconsider their use because the popular drugs may actually increase the risk of suicide." Andre Picard reports for the Toronto Globe and Mail.

"We are a long way from the sporting days of 'Chariots of Fire,' when an Olympics-bound athlete could be censured for using a professional trainer. Today, although we still fuss about the use of steroids in sports, we are actually complicit in the growing dependencies of our gigantic heroes. We not only enjoy the spectacle of greater power and speed pitted against fiercer pursuit and bone-crushing tackles; we cannot readily articulate our unease with performance-enhancing drugs -- either in athletics or in many other activities." See "The Price Of Winning At Any Cost" in The Washington Post by Leon Kass and Eric Cohen.

"Federal regulators said for the first time yesterday that clinical trials of popular antidepressants such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft show a greater risk of suicide among children taking the drugs compared with those taking dummy pills. Although only one of these drugs has been approved for the treatment of children with depression, doctors are prescribing them to hundreds of thousands of American children every year. The new Food and Drug Administration analysis of the trials is starkly at odds with repeated assurances by the U.S. psychiatric establishment that the drugs are very safe." See "FDA Links Antidepressants, Youth Suicide Risk" in The Washington Post.

Zantrex-3, Anorex, Carb Eliminator: dietary supplements are enormously popular and virtually unregulated. Michael Spector writes, "There are almost no standards that regulate how the pills are made, and they receive almost no scrutiny once they are, so consumers never truly know what they are getting. Companies are not required to prove that products are effective, or even safe, before they are put on the market." See "Miracle in a Bottle" in The New Yorker.

Malcolm Gladwell has written about the way change is often accelerated by "social epidemics'' for The New Yorker and in his book, The Tipping Point. His ideas have been enthusiastically embraced by the business world. Now Gladwell has entered into a "research advisory alliance" with Simmons Market Research Bureau in New York. He says he sees no conflict of interest in collaborating with businesses while also writing about them. See "New Yorker Writer Accumulates Points in Corporate Circles" in The New York Times.

The drug industry is giving honoraria, dinners, consulting fees and trips to exotic locations to the state mental health officials reponsible for setting up guidelines for the use of antipsychotic drugs. In Pennsylvania, mental health officials have set up a bank account for drug industry donations. See Melody Peterson's "Making Drugs, Shaping the Rules" in The New York Times.