YEAR IN REVIEW: It was a year packed with health gems: the sperm in the lab, the fried chicken in Florida and the yoga-performing pooches. Claire O'Connellremembers the oddest stories of 2009
BY NOW you are probably growing weary of compilation lists from 2009: the most popular, the most shocking, the most newsworthy.
But spare just a thought for another, possibly more off-kilter round-up – what were the eye-catchingly unusual, thought-provoking and downright bizarre health stories from the last 12 months of the noughties?
They would have to include the story that British scientists had converted embryonic stem cells into sperm in the lab.
The paper, published last July in the journal Stem Cells and Development, was presented by the researchers as a potential breakthrough in basic research into the biology of human fertility, and they were at pains to point out that there was no question of using the derived sperm to make humans in Petri dishes.
But the publication still sparked runaway forecasts in the media that painted vistas of males finally being made redundant – at least reproductively.
Somewhere amid the clatter of hype, experts were already pointing out that to call what had been made from stem cells in the lab “sperm” was something of a long shot, if you’ll pardon the expression.
The eyebrows raised a notch higher when it was noticed that paragraphs in the published paper had been lifted directly from a previous work, constituting plagiarism. A researcher within the group was blamed for the error.
The breakthrough paper was retracted – a death knell for any piece of research – although the journal diplomatically commented at the time that striking the publication from the record did not automatically discredit the science within.
It just shows you have to be careful what you write. And for medical doctors, it seems that you also have to be careful how you frame information to patients about improving their diet.
US physician Dr Jason Newsom landed in the legal equivalent of a deep-fat fryer when he used an electronic sign at his clinic in Panama City, Florida, to highlight the downsides of eating certain branded foods, including sweet glazed fare from a large doughnut franchise and fried chicken offerings from a popular fast-food outlet.
When lawyers threatened to sue over the messages, Newsom eventually resigned last May. But he reportedly reapplied for the position as he wanted to get his old job back to keep tackling the issue of overeating.
“My method was a little provocative and controversial,” the former army doctor told Associated Press. “But there wasn’t a person in Bay County who wasn’t talking about health and healthy eating.”
And if all those thoughts of gorging on fried dough and chicken has left you feeling in need of a nap, you are not alone. A survey in the US revealed this summer that one in three adults there grabs a siesta on any typical day.
The definition of a nap was pretty loose and could be as innocuous as dozing off slightly while on a train or reading, commented a New York Timesarticle about the survey.
But the same piece also rang an endorsement of good and proper snoozes from the National Sleep Foundation’s website: “While naps do not necessarily make up for inadequate or poor quality night-time sleep, a short nap of 20-30 minutes can help to improve mood, alertness and performance.”
If you are still awake, try this one for size: does cracking your knuckles give you arthritis? That question may have cost you a few minutes of attention over your life, but for US allergist Dr Donald L Unger it has taken up over 60 years of his time on earth.
His mother used to warn him that cracking his knuckles would lead to the chronic inflammatory condition, so from his teens he cracked the joints on his left hand at least twice daily as an experiment, while leaving his right hand uncracked as a control.
The result? Fortunately, arthritis in neither hand. Unger published the results over a decade ago but earlier this year picked up a 2009 Ig Nobel prize for his efforts.
Other winners of this year’s tongue-in-cheek awards for improbable research also included Swiss scientists who investigated whether it is safer to be hit over the head with an empty beer bottle or a full one.
In publishing their results in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, the researchers noted that when tested in a drop tower, full standard half-litre beer bottles broke at 30J impact energy while their empty counterparts walloped at 40J. Both breaking energies are enough to fracture a human skull, they noted.
But as we coast through the Christmas season of socialising, let’s put down the beer bottles, whether full or empty, and bear in mind that the funny guys get the girls.
At least that’s according to a psychology study at Northumbria University in Newcastle which asked 45 heterosexual women to rate fictional vignettes where prospective male partners were either hilarious or not quite so entertaining.
The humorous characters were preferred, and after presenting the results in a poster at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference in Brighton, researcher Kristofor McCarty wrote to CNN: “Over the course of history, women actively look for signs that their man is intelligent, and I believe the ability to actively judge the situation and pull off a joke and make you laugh is an intelligent feat.”
Although, given that the conference was held in the first week of April, perhaps the joke was on us.
For something completely different, how about the life-saving Blackberry? Skier David Fitzherbert probably owes his life to the gadget, which physically stopped him falling deep into a crevasse in Switzerland, according to a story in The Sun.
The device in his breast pocket was just thick enough to wedge the hapless skier between two walls of ice in the ravine and stop him from plummeting further into the 210m drop.
His mountain guide phoned for help, and after two hours Fitzherbert was rescued and brought to Bern to be treated for injuries and hypothermia. Amazingly the plucky little Blackberry still worked and the recovering patient used it to call his wife.
And finally, if one of your new year’s resolutions is to practise yoga rather than brave the slopes, perhaps you could get your paws on a new calendar that brings a whole new meaning to the “down dog”.
Developed by Texan couple Dan and Alejandra Borris, the Yoga Dogs Calendar 2010 features computer-aided images of dogs in standard yoga poses like warrior and pendant.
The animals were never in distress, insists photographer Dan, whose wife coaxed the animals into a suitable position, then the images were doctored to come up with the final forms. So to avoid pet injury don’t try this at home with your own pooch. Barking.
