Global Update

Indian Pediatrics 2002; 39:1175

News in Brief

You must be joking: A new discipline has acquired legitimacy - medical clowning. This course has started in a hospital near Tel Aviv in Israel. Inspired by the film, Patch Adams, the course involves 80 hours of training over 6 months. Teachers will include doctors, magicians and experts in community theatre. Doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and even bankers have enrolled to be trained. The course has been started by a pediatrician, Dr Shai Pintov who believes deeply in the therapeutic value of humour in medical care (eBMJ 26 October 2002).

The next step: The natural course of science is to move from the general to the specific. The human genome project gave a general overview of what the average human being is made up of. However while 99.9% of the genetic make up is identical in individuals, 0.1% varies and these variations decide how people look, how they behave and what illnesses they suffer from. So now the entire focus is to identify the 0.1% of variations which constitute some 10 million genes. However the big breakthrough is that genes are not passed down randomly but in blocks called haplotypes. For each human character some 4-5 haplotypes are available. The next generation human genome map is now being prepared: not of genes but haplotypes. Some 100 million euros has been ear marked for the "HapMap" project by the John Hopkins University and an international consortium of scientists (eBMJ 9 Nov 2002).

The nobler prize: The nobel prize for science has gone only 3 times to scientists in developing countries. To recognize the many excellent, unsung scientists who work in such challenging conditions in the third world, a new award has been instituted. The Trieste Prize. The prize of US $ 100,000 was announced by the Third World Academy of Sciences for scientists from developing countries for their lifetime contributions to science ( The Lancet interactive 2 November 2002).

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