"Somewhere in the middle pages of '1984,' Winston Smith is being inducted into the shadowy and, as it turns out, nonexistent 'Brotherhood' of resistance to Big Brother, and, to celebrate, the Inner Party member O’Brien pours him a glass of wine. Winston has never had wine before, but he has read about it, and he is desperately excited to try it, since he expects it to taste like blackberry jam and to be instantly intoxicating. Instead, of course, the wine tastes the way wine tastes the first time you taste it—a bit acidic and bitter—and a single sip, or glass, isn’t intoxicating at all. The intensity of this experience as a model of disappointment was significant enough for Orwell so that he inserted it in his dystopia right there among all the greater horrors—as though the future weren’t bad enough, that whole wine thing will go on, too."

"Fifty years later, we live in a wine world where, for the first time, there are wines that do taste like blackberry jam and are instantly intoxicating, or nearly so, and how these wines came into being is the subject of a new book, 'Noble Rot' (Norton; $24.95), by William Echikson. The book tells the story of the wine life of the Bordeaux region of France over the past twenty years, and, though Echikson does not quite have the narrative skills to assemble it, he lays out all the pieces of a first-class Henry James comedy about the brutality of American innocence, the helplessness of French sophistication, and the need for intoxicants that are always called by some other name and claimed for some other purpose."

See Adam Gopnik's "Through a Glass Darkly" in The New Yorker.

"In a settlement that the New York State attorney general said would transform the drug industry, GlaxoSmithKline agreed today to post on its Web site the results of all clinical trials involving its drugs."

"'This settlement is transformational in that it will provide doctors and patients access to the clinical testing data necessary to make informed judgments,' the attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, said."

"While the case involves only GlaxoSmithKline, the British drug maker, Mr. Spitzer predicted other companies would soon follow its lead by posting the results of their own studies online. Eli Lilly, for example, has said it will create a Web site on which it will list the results of clinical tests of approved drugs, including trials of those drugs for new uses. Several other companies, including Johnson & Johnson and Merck, have said they support the concept of a publicly available database that would list trial results."

See "Maker of Paxil to Release All Trial Results" in The New York Times.

"For a glimpse of what post-human athletes may look like beginning in the 2012 or 2016 Olympics, take a look at an obscure breed of cattle called the Belgian Blue."

"Belgian Blues are unlike any cows you've ever seen. They have a genetic mutation that means they do not have effective myostatin, a substance that curbs muscle growth. A result is that Belgian Blues are all bulging muscles without a spot of fat, like bovine caricatures of Arnold Schwarzenegger."

"These mutants may also point to the future of humans, particularly athletes. Gene therapies are being developed that would block myostatin in humans, and they offer immense promise in treating muscular dystrophy and the frailty that comes with aging. But once this gene therapy becomes available for people who really need it, it'll take about 10 minutes before athletes are surreptitiously using it, particularly because, in contrast to today's doping, gene therapy leaves no trace in the blood or urine."

"The standard human shape would become different, and anyone with money could look like a body builder. As H. Lee Sweeney, chairman of physiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, writes in a fascinating article in July's Scientific American, 'The world may be about to watch one of its last Olympic Games without genetically enhanced athletes.'"

See "Building Better Bodies" by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times.

"There is something quite lunatic about the entire debate on whether to permit imports of drugs from Canada. It's not as if Canada manufactures drugs more cheaply. Nor are drugs like trees, or bauxite, or hydro power, which just happen to be naturally plentiful in Canada."

"No, the cheaper Canadian drugs are the same ones sold at higher prices in the United States, and either exported or licensed for manufacture in Canada."

"Why are they cheaper up north? Because Canada has a policy of controlling drug prices through its national health insurance system. As Deborah Stone, a health policy expert at Dartmouth, has observed, it's not the drugs we should be importing, it's the policy."

See "Wrong Cure" by Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect.

"If you had lived in Japan for the last five years, you would know by now that your kokoro is at risk of coming down with a cold. Your kokoro is not part of your respiratory system. It is not a member of your family. Its treatment lies well beyond the bailiwick of your average ear, nose and throat doctor. Your kokoro is your soul, and the notion that it can catch cold (kokoro no kaze) was introduced to Japan by the pharmaceutical industry to explain mild depression to a country that almost never discussed it." Kathryn Schulz asks, "Did Antidepressants Depress Japan?" in The New York Times Magazine.

"Christopher Pittman said he remembered everything about that night in late 2001 when he killed his grandparents: the blood, the shotgun blasts, the voices urging him on, even the smoke detectors that screamed as he drove away from their rural South Carolina home after setting it on fire."

"'Something kept telling me to do it,' he later told a forensic psychiatrist. "

"Now, Christopher, who was 12 years old at the time of the killings, faces charges of first-degree murder. The decision by a local prosecutor to try him as an adult could send him to prison for life. While prosecutors portray him as a troubled killer, his defenders say the killings occurred for a reason beyond the boy's control - a reaction to the antidepressant Zoloft, a drug he had started taking for depression not long before the slayings."

See "Boy's Murder Case Entangled in Fight Over Antidepressants" in The New York Times.

"An obese Massachusetts woman and her 8-month-old fetus died of complications 18 months after the woman had stomach-stapling surgery, an apparent first that is leading to warnings about the risks of pregnancy soon after the surgery. The deaths, in 2002, raise concerns because most of the 110,000 people who have gastric, or stomach, bypass surgery each year in the United States are women in their child-bearing years, say doctors at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who tried to save the woman and fetus." See "Case Offers Caution on Stomach-Stapling Surgery" in The New York Times.

"South Africa is having a serious debate over how to license its doctors. Legislators are pondering minimum requirements for medical practice, rules of professional ethics and standards for quality of care. A government research council is conducting double-blind, placebo-controlled tests on potential new prescription drugs. Insurance companies are considering new claims-reimbursement guidelines."

"It is the very model of a modern regulatory process, with one exception: these doctors are sangomas - diviners, who cure with combinations of herbal potions, readings of scattered bones and second opinions from long-dead ancestors. Disbelievers long pinned them with the offensive label 'witch doctors.' Today's politically correct term is 'traditional healers.'

See "Between Faith and Medicine, How Clear a Line?"

"Some users of DeWalt's 14.4-volt, 5 3/8-inch circular trim saw, a jaunty little machine that looks like a yellow and black flashlight with a jagged CD slapped on one side, are so enamored of it that they have posted testimonials on the Web. One posting, fondly titled "The Little Saw That Could," raves, "I have found this saw to be very capable of doing most of the cutting that I do around the house. But John (Sam Turich), the lead character of Kyle Jarrow's perverse new farce, "Armless," which opens tomorrow afternoon at the Fringe Festival, has no interest in trimming chair rails. A Westchester-variety yuppie, mired in ennui and material riches, John plans to use the saw to lop off his arms. But first he has to coax his wife, who suffers from panic attacks, to stop hyperventilating long enough to give him the go-ahead, and he also has to persuade an incompetent plastic surgeon to handle the post-op. John, you see, suffers from body integrity identity disorder, or B.I.I.D., an actual condition in which the sufferer yearns to sever his own limbs." See "The Saw Is the Star (Never Mind the Role)" in The New York Times.

"They've been called quacks and embarrassments to the scientific community, doctors who use 'pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo' to persuade people to give them their money.
Now, they're fighting back. The American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine and its Chicago founders, Drs. Robert Goldman and Ronald Klatz, are suing professors from the University of Illinois-Chicago and Harvard University, alleging they have trashed their reputations in an effort to discredit their anti-aging works. S. Jay Olshansky and Thomas Perls are the targets of the $150 million lawsuit filed last week in Cook County Circuit Court." See "Doctors pushing anti-aging treatment sue detractors" in the Chicago Sun-Times.

"In the part of South Carolina where I grew up, you can't travel too far without seeing a field or a patch of woods covered with a thick, green canopy of kudzu. Kudzu is a crawling vine native to Japan that was introduced to the South in the 1930s to prevent soil erosion. The federal government paid farmers to plant it. What neither the farmers nor the government anticipated was just how hardy kudzu would become in the humid Southern climate, where the soil is rich and kudzu has no natural enemies. There, kudzu grows like a pole bean on steroids. The vines extend themselves by a foot a day and will cover objects up to forty feet in height. It is not uncommon to see large trees, telephone poles, barns, abandoned tractors, or rusting cars completely enveloped by kudzu vines. Not only do most herbicides fail to kill kudzu, at least one of them is said to make it grow even faster. Enterprising Southerners sometimes say that if you could just harness kudzu for a commercial purpose you could make a mint, but the fact is that you'd be more likely to make a B-grade horror movie, like The Monolith Monsters or The Day of the Triffids. Some Southerners claim that if you don't keep your windows closed at night, kudzu will swallow up your children while they sleep."

"When the merits of new, largely unknown technological advances are being argued-embryonic stem cells and nanotechnology at Harvard, kudzu control and air conditioning in South Carolina-the ethical debate often hinges on an effort to weigh up the potential risks and benefits of the technology. Yet how those risks and benefits are balanced usually depends on the prediction of some hypothetical future scenario that, in the actual event, often turns out to have been shortsighted, misguided, or wrong. The costly decision to introduce kudzu to the South is a good example of what Edward Tenner, the author of When Things Bite Back, calls "the revenge of unintended consequences." Sometimes these consequences are simply the unforeseen side effects of a new technology, the way automobile exhaust helped bring about a hole in the ozone layer or kudzu overtook entire farms. But they also include the larger social changes that a new technology brings about. It took no great feat of imagination to see that automobiles could cause pollution. But who could have looked at automobiles in 1915 and anticipated NASCAR dads, the Mall of America, and drive-through liquor stores?"

See Carl Elliott's "A World of Our Own Making" in Dissent.