"A state judge ordered synthetic growth hormone treatment for a 4-foot-2 11-year-old whose divorced parents went to court Thursday over whether he should get the drug. 'This really is a landmark case,' said the boy's father, S. Alan Childress, a 5-foot-5 law professor who opposes the treatment as unnecessary and risky for his son Steven. He said he knows of no other court ruling in such a case. The hormone was approved only last July for use in children who are very short but otherwise healthy." See "Judge Orders Growth Hormone for Boy" in the Times-Picayune.

"The story line was simple and compelling: Blackburn was a proponent of embryonic stem cell research, while Bush -- and his most ardent supporters -- was not. During a campaign stop shortly after Blackburn's dismissal, likely Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry told reporters, 'A scientific panel ought to be chosen on the basis of science and on the basis of reputation, not politics.'

The problem is that this simple story line is almost certainly wrong. Interviews with several members of the council -- including its chairman, University of Chicago ethicist Leon Kass -- and, more important, a review of its meetings and reports on stem cell research show Blackburn's charges of partisanship to be weak. It's not at all clear that Blackburn was dismissed for her views, rather than for her performance on the council (she was, for starters, serially absent from meetings, missing about half, more than any other member). And the council's reports -- particularly its lengthy inquiry into stem cell research, which the council released in January -- bear none of the biases she has accused the council of harboring." See "Thou shalt not make scientific progress" by Farhad Manjoo in Salon.

"Outside, the sign in front of Mr. Gorski's Victorian house on Staten Island read: Fairplay Male Image Consultants. Inside, on a recent night, Mr. Gorski was transforming two men into Samantha and Melissa... Clients like Samantha and Melissa say their need to cross-dress is not optional. Samantha, the New York advertising executive, said he cross-dressed "to fulfill what I want to be." Divorced, he said he dated women but described himself as gender dysphoric, a condition in which someone feels trapped in the body of the opposite sex. "There's another part of my personality, a feminine part, that wants to come through," Samantha said as his arms were being waxed. "It's not that the guy isn't there. But there's a whole flip side." See "Learning to Walk in Size 17 Pumps" in The New York Times.

"The government's warning on Monday that people newly taking antidepressants can become suicidal and must be closely monitored grew at least in part from a concern that the drugs were being handed out too freely and without enough follow-up, especially in children and teenagers." See "Overprescribing Prompted Warning on Antidepressants" in The New York Times.

The FDA has issued warnings about a number of antidepressants, but how exactly do those antidepressants work? Brendan Koerner explains in Slate.

"On February 24, the DEA issued Dr. Michael Mithoefer a Schedule I license to legally obtain Ecstasy for a study of its potential therapeutic effects in the treatment of PTSD. Researchers hope that the drug, which melts anxiety, will help PTSD patients talk openly about the experiences that scarred them. It is the first study of Ecstasy-enhanced psychotherapy ever green-lighted in the United States, one that's been in the making for almost two decades." See "The Ecstasy Factor" by Carla Spartos in The Village Voice.

"Doctors who prescribe some popular antidepressants should monitor their patients closely for warning signs of suicide, especially when they first start the pills or change a dose, the government warned Monday. The Food and Drug Administration asked makers of 10 drugs to add or strengthen suicide-related warnings on their labels." See "F.D.A. Seeks Suicide Caution for Ten Antidepressants" in The New York Times.

"Lou Marinoff is the world's most successful marketer of philosophical counseling. A controversial new talk therapy, philosophical counseling takes the premise that many of our problems stem from uncertainties about the meaning of life and from faulty logic... But what if a philosopher with zero mental health training fails to recognize a student's suicidal tendencies and prescribes Heidegger instead of psychiatric intervention?" See "The Socratic Shrink" by Daniel Duane in the New York Times Magazine.

"A new book has rekindled old rumours that renowned psychologist BF Skinner used his baby daughter in his experiments. Stop this rubbish about me and my dad, says Deborah Skinner Buzan." See "I was not a lab rat" in The Guardian, by BF Skinnner's daughter.

Research shows that bald mice can grow hair after being implanted with a type of stem cell. See "Baldness Cure a hair Away" in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

"They have been called assassins and parasites. They receive hate mail from the proponents of a variety of popular psychotherapies. The president-elect of the American Psychological Association has accused them of being overly devoted to the scientific method. But the ire of their colleagues has not prevented a small, loosely organized band of academic psychologists from rooting out and publicly debunking mental health practices that they view as faddish, unproved or in some cases potentially harmful." See "Defying Psychiatric Wisdom, These Skeptics Say 'Prove It'" in the New York Times.

James Gordon grew up at Sissinghurst Castle as the child of servants. He moved to New York as a young man, wrote a novel that sold 17 copies in a year, and after coming into a large inheritance from a patron, eventually moved to Charleston, South Carolina to become an antiques dealer. In middle age, he underwent surgery to clarify his sexual identity as a woman, changed his name to Dawn Langley-Simmons, married a young black mechanic and played "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" at the wedding. The couple produced a daughter, Natasha, which they claimed was their biological child. Edward Ball has written a biography of Dawn Langley-Simmons, Peninsula of Lies, which is reviewed by Janet Maslin in the New York Times.

"Leon Kass, the University of Chicago social theorist and bioethicist, has had the misfortune to chair the President's Council on Bioethics under a man who inspires more revulsion among academics than any president since Richard Nixon. Last week, 170 academic bioethicists sent a petition to President Bush protesting the dismissal of two members of the council, the cell biologist Elizabeth Blackburn and the ethicist William May. Blackburn had told the press she was dismissed because she clashed with Kass, and ethicists have been quick to assume that the two members were dismissed for ideological reasons. Perhaps it is a sign of our strange, politically charged times that the composition of the council can generate protests and petitions from bioethicists while its actual work has been largely ignored.

This is a shame. The council, which was formed in 2001 to advise the president on ethical issues surrounding medicine and biotechnology, has recently published the findings of a two-year project in a report titled Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. As the title suggests, the report concerns the use of drugs and surgery that not only make sick people well but make well people better than well. Americans take Paxil for shyness, Provigil for sleepiness, Adderall for poor concentration, Ativan for anxiety, Humatrope for short stature, Propecia for baldness, Xenical for obesity, beta blockers for stage fright, designer steroids for poor athletic performance, and Viagra for poor sexual performance—and that's not even counting the possible future technologies on the table, from memory managers to genetic enhancement to longevity drugs. Beyond Therapy asks not whether it is right or wrong to use such technologies, but rather, what are the implications of these technologies, what will they mean for us "as individuals, as members of American society, and as human beings eager to live well in an age of biotechnology"?

For the rest, see "Beyond Politics" in Slate, and responses in "The Fray."

"Facelifts were once a Hollywood secret. Now they're advertised on the bus. Geraldine Bedell visits three cosmetic surgeons and asks: if everyone else is having a nip and a tuck, should she?" See "How Do You Want Me?" in The Observer.

"Our great-great grandparents would find it hard to believe the Boeing 747, but perhaps they'd have a harder time believing last week's news that obesity has become the second-leading cause of death in the United States. Too much food a menace instead of too little! A study released by the federal Centers for Disease Control ranked "poor diet and physical inactivity" as the cause of 400,000 United States deaths in 2000, trailing only fatalities from tobacco. Obesity, the C.D.C. said, now kills five times as many Americans as "microbial agents," that is, infectious disease... Increasingly, Western life is afflicted by the paradoxes of progress. Material circumstances keep improving, yet our quality of life may be no better as a result - especially in those cases, like food, where enough becomes too much." Read "All This Progress Is Killing Us, Bite by Bite" by Gregg Easterbrook.

A lay representative has resigned from a working group of the British drug regulatory agency, accusing the agency of negligence in its review of Paxil (Seroxat.) Richard Brook's resignation came in protest at what he considered a cover-up, after months of pressure on him not to reveal the review's findings that Paxil has been prescribed by doctors at unsafe doses for many years. See "Drug safety agency accused of cover-up" in The Guardian, and an accompanying editorial.

Elizabeth Blackburn, recently dismissed from the President's Council on Bioethics, criticizes Kass and the Council in The New England Journal of Medicine. See "Bioethics and the Political Distortion of Biomedical Science." Meanwhile, Edward Rothstein sees much to admire in the Council's recent collection of readings, Being Human. See his review, The Meaning of 'Human' in Embryonic Research," in The New York Times.

"The ideal almost everywhere is to seem young for as long as possible. The health clubs and endemic workout clothes, the enormous increase in cosmetic surgery (for women and men), the special youth-oriented television programming and moviemaking, all these are merely the more obvious signs of the triumph of youth culture. When I say youth culture, I do not mean merely that the young today are transcendent, the group most admired among the various age groups in American society, but that youth is no longer viewed as a transitory state, through which one passes on the way from childhood to adulthood, but an aspiration, a vaunted condition in which, if one can only arrange it, to settle in perpetuity." Joseph Epstein laments the death of adulthood in "The Perpetual Adolescent."

"What worries many about the recent cloning of human embryos in South Korea is that reproductive cloning of human beings may be just around the corner. Given the virtual inevitability of this technological breakthrough (scientists around the world have been aggressively pursuing this goal) and the company it keeps (plenty of scientific techniques can be put to unethical uses) such a development should come as no surprise. What should worry us is that to create these cloned embryos 242 eggs were extracted from 16 female volunteers." Read "The Women Behind Cloning" by Josephine Johnston in The Washington Post.

Kevin Shapiro, a Harvard neuroscientist, writes in Commentary that Beyond Therapy is eloquent and impressive. But Ron Bailey, writing in Reason, disagrees. More reactions to the President's Council's report on enhancement technologies.

"This is an age that continually encourages people to define themselves according to whom they really are, rather than according to what they do, what they believe, or their relationships with others. It pushes people to focus on their own fashion preferences, body-art, sexuality, family roots or emotional feelings about themselves, and to see engagement with others as a dangerous distraction from their own personal journey of self-discovery." See Frank Furedi's essay, "The Politics of the Lonely Crowd" in Spiked.

"All societies construct their own images of heaven. Most imagine a wondrous city or a verdant garden where human beings come face to face with God. But the heaven that is apparently popular with readers these days is nothing more than an excellent therapy session. In Albom's book, God, to the extent that he exists there, is sort of a genial Dr. Phil. When you go to his heaven, friends and helpers come and tell you how innately wonderful you are. They help you reach closure." See "Hooked on Heaven Lite" by David Brooks.

"Mild bipolar disorder may be to this decade what depression was to the nineties, thanks to a new drug and an expanding definition. But when do ordinary peaks and valleys become pathological?" Vanessa Grigoriadis asks, "Are You Bipolar?" in New York magazine.

"Even before the President's Council on Bioethics had its first meeting in January 2002, charges were flying that the council was stacked with political and religious conservatives, appointed to rubber-stamp the president's moral and political views. One newspaper story on the day of our first meeting even went so far as to compare us to the Taliban. Today those charges are swirling again, in response to three new appointments the president has made to the council, as we begin our second term. The charges were malicious and false then, as they are now." Leon Kass responds to his critics in The Washington Post. See also the op-ed by sacked Council member Elizabeth Blackburn.

'Luke said that when he arrived at Brown, he was a masculine-appearing lesbian, but had no plans to change sex. "I had questioned my sexuality, but not my gender," Luke said. Then he spent a year studying in Cuba, where people "were genuinely shocked when I said I was a woman. It was disorienting and scary. And I had to really think about it: am I a woman?" After returning from Cuba, he said, "I took more and more pains to hide my breasts and to pass as male." After meeting several female-to-male transsexuals, he said, "I realized I had options."' See "On Campus, Rethinking Biology 101" by Fred Bernstein in The New York Times.

"From my own personal experience," said Mario J. Vasallo, "and 36 of the 38 guys I interviewed said the same thing: once you take start taking steroids, within the first three days, it's a different life you're leading. You feel invincible, on top of the world. Within two weeks, you feel your workouts change. You used to do an hour and a half and get tired. You can change to two hours a day and feel ready to go back and do the same thing. And the pump you get, you don't want to lose it." See "Addictive Effects of Steroids Raise Questions About Users' Awareness" in The New York Times.

Estrogen was touted as the anti-aging drug of the 1960s in best-selling books such as Feminine Forever. But yet another study has failed to show overall health benefits. Denise Grady writes, "A large federal study of estrogen therapy in postmenopausal women has been stopped a year ahead of schedule because the estrogen increased the risk of stroke and offered no protection against heart disease, the government announced yesterday." See "Estrogen Study Stopped" in the New York Times and the accompanying editorial.