"Here's the thing: My brother isn't sick. He's short. Shorter than every boy and girl in Ms. Lemcke's fourth-grade class, shorter than 97 percent of boys his age. What I've just shot into his 3-foot-11-and-three-quarters-inch, 50-pound body is Humatrope, a lab-brewed human growth hormone (hGH) nearly identical to the hGH secreted by the pituitary gland, the critical metabolic hormone that regulates not only height, as its name suggests, but also cardiac function, fat metabolism and muscle growth.

Alex's quest for "enheightenment," as I've come to call it, began last summer just as the Food and Drug Administration expanded its approved uses of Humatrope, Eli Lilly & Co.'s recombinant hGH, to include children of idiopathic short stature (ISS)--kids who are extremely short for reasons that are not entirely understood. Kids who, like Alex, are teased or ignored by classmates who may trump their height by a foot--but whose "condition" may be caused by nothing more than genetics. This groundbreaking and controversial FDA ruling made Humatrope available to 400,000 American children expected to grow no taller than 5 feet 3 in the case of boys and 4 feet 11 in the case of girls, putting them in the bottom 1.2 percentile. For Alex, the nightly hGH shots will probably continue for six to eight years--all to make this otherwise healthy boy grow taller."

Read Jenny Everett's article "My Little Brother on Drugs" in Popular Science.

"Medicine is becoming a sort of Cloud Cuckoo Land, where doctors don't know what papers they can trust in the journals, and the public doesn't know what to believe," says Dr. Drummond Rennie, former deputy editor of JAMA, in Shannon Brownlee's article in The Washington Monthly, "Doctors Without Borders: Why You Can't Trust Medical Journals Anymore."

"Happiness has become the goal of medicine -- and it will make us miserable." See Carl Elliott's "The Identity Clinic" in The Guardian and in Thailand's "The Nation."

Why are Europeans getting taller and taller, while Americans are not? Burkhard Bilger investigates for The New Yorker with "The Height Gap."