Richard Knox

In a milestone for the fast-evolving field of tissue engineering, a 36-year-old geology student from Africa is breathing through a synthetic windpipe created in a laboratory from plastic and his own bone marrow cells.

Andemarian Teklesenbet Beyene was discharged today from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, one day short of a month since he had his cancerous windpipe replaced with the custom-made spare part.

Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is taking a page from TV anchor Katie Couric by going public about colonoscopy.

Three years ago Couric, whose husband died of colon cancer, had her colonoscopy on camera as a way of encouraging others to have one too. It was so effective that epidemiologists named the resulting increase in colonoscopy tests "the Couric effect."

Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital have disciplined three faculty members in a long-running conflict-of-interest case that became a prime exhibit in the debate over the federal Physician Payments Sunshine Act of 2010.

The kidney-destroying E. coli strain called O14:H4 has struck again, this time in France. And the latest outbreak is giving disease detectives more clues about how the germ is getting into Europeans' food.

It's the fenugreek seeds, they think.

Ever since scientists began to sequence the entire genomes of individuals --beginning with those of Nobelist James Watson and scientific entrepreneur J. Craig Venter in 2007 — skeptics have wondered just how useful this elegant and expensive trick would become.