The Secret Medical Records of Presidential Candidates

Senator Paul Tsongas had a secret when he ran in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary - his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma had returned despite a bone-marrow transplant. Yet Tsongas and his physicians continued to claim he was "cancer-free" and his true medical condition became public only after his campaign folded. Had voters elected him president instead of Bill Clinton, Tsongas would have endured crippling cancer treatments and died in office, as he did just a few years later. "I don't know if he could have even gone to the inauguration. It would have been a public policy disaster," says Robert Gilbert, a political science professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Mass.

As the 2008 presidential race wears on, the medical records of presidential candidates remain shielded by federal law. None are legally required to disclose any medical conditions when running for commander in chief. But a number of historians, bioethics scholars and physicians have argued that medical privacy should not allow presidential candidates to hide serious health problems from voters.

"If you get on a plane, that pilot gets a physical every six months," observes Dr. James Toole, a professor of neurology at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C. Presidential candidates "need physicals," particularly mental health examinations, Toole says, to hold them accountable to voters. At least ten sitting presidents suffered from some mental disorder while in office, according to a 2006 study in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

Some current and past candidates have gone public with certain medical conditions. Senator John McCain's campaign released thousands of pages of medical records relating to the candidate's mental health in the 2000 presidential election, and the senator has said he will do the same in 2008 when he turns 72.

Experts likewise suggest that a voluntary agreement on medical disclosure could provide a starting point for candidates to informally agree on some election ground rules.

Yet voluntary disclosure is a somewhat "perverse" system that only encourages presidential candidates to reveal health problems when they don't matter, says Robert Streiffer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Expecting presidential candidates to come clean with medical conditions that would jeopardize their chances of winning over the public is naïve, says Streiffer, especially if history serves as any guide.

Tsongas wasn't the first presidential candidate - or president - to hide a serious ailment. President Woodrow Wilson concealed the fact that he had three minor strokes leading up to his run for the presidency. In 1919, after guiding the United States through World War I and attempting to set up the predecessor organization to the United Nations, Wilson suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed and blinded on the left side of his body for the remainder of his second term.

"He was operating with great difficulty. He couldn't have a cabinet meeting for nine months," notes Robert Gilbert, who wrote several books on presidential illness. When Wilson's vice president refused to take over, Wilson limped along in his presidential duties with the help of his wife, Edith, who decided which issues deserved the president's attention.

As a presidential candidate, Wilson's deception about his earlier strokes resulted in the "disenfranchisement of the entire American people," according to Streiffer. He coauthored a 2006 article in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy along with several philosophers and a physician suggesting that presidential candidates have a moral duty to reveal certain medical conditions. The idea is that voters have the right to an informed consent of the governed, which includes knowing any relevant conditions that would seriously affect how a president may perform in office.

At least one option now exists so that a president's illness - whether concealed prior to the presidency or acquired during office - does not leave the nation rudderless. The 25th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed following President John F. Kennedy's assassination to provide emergency options, such as the vice president taking over temporarily when the president is stricken.

Former President Carter pushed further for the creation of a "nonpartisan group" of physicians to help decide when a president's illness affects his judgment. In 1993, he published a speech in the Journal of the American Medical Association that led to the formation of the Working Group on Presidential Disability, consisting of scholars and physicians. "Doctors of previous presidents all said it [presidential disability] was a terrible problem," says Toole, who helped get former presidents Carter and Ford interested in the issue.

Toole and many physicians in the working group liked the idea of a nonpartisan medical panel. Sitting presidents customarily go through an annual physical with personal physicians, but the examination is not legally required. A similar process could also be applied to presidential aspirants in order to "certify that candidates are grade A," says Toole.

But Robert Gilbert is more cautious. As another former member of the working group, he fears such a medical panel could easily become politicized during election season. "What happens if the panel's doctors disagree?" he asks. "Suppose there was a 4-3 vote? It would undermine the presidency." Perhaps the 2000 election quagmire, decided by a 5-4 vote in the U.S. Supreme Court, serves as a reminder of how independent panels can be seen as undercutting rather than helping safeguard the right to decide who becomes president.

Congress did not follow up or act on the temporary Working Group for Presidential Disability's suggestions, leaving the situation still muddied today. The uncertainty even creates the opposite problem of voters struggling to sort through too much irrelevant medical information. The news media loves following up on every medical tidbit among the remaining presidential candidates, particularly focusing on Senator John McCain's age and past medical history of skin cancer, enlarged prostate and wartime wounds.

None of the experts interviewed for this article think those health issues should count against McCain in his bid for the presidency . However, that did not stop former Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee from sniping at McCain's age - whether through ads or through campaign trail surrogates such as Chuck Norris. Health gossip might make for juicy headlines and provide ammunition for political mudslinging, but it can also distract from the serious question of whether a candidate is capable of being president.

"Candidates have a lot of information that should be private, and you're putting them at a real disadvantage by forcing them to disclose everything," warns Wisconsin's Streiffer. Gilbert and Toole agree that forcing presidential candidates to reveal all details of their medical records would leave voters "buried under a landslide" of irrelevant medical information - and that would go against the goal of making elections more transparent.

"It seems to me if someone is really convinced that a medical condition - physical or psychological - would have an impact on the office, then they would have an obligation to reveal that condition, but only then," says Gilbert. "Everyone has privacy rights, and candidates have privacy rights too."

This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. Jeremy Hsu is a staff writer for LiveScience.com.

Australian dilemma: too many kangaroos, too few devils

Researchers are trying to battle a cancer epidemic among Tasmanian devils, and on Wednesday they were listed as endangered. At the same time, an abundance of kangaroos has prompted the government to begin administering lethal injections to 400 of the animals.

Protesters have vowed to seek a court injunction to stop the slaughter of the eastern gray kangaroos, which are viewed as sacred symbols by Australia's indigenous people.

Scientists say the kangaroos' rapidly growing population threatens their survival, as well as that of some reptiles and insects that share their grassy habitat.

Police on Wednesday charged eight Aboriginal activists with trespassing on the Canberra site where the kangaroos are being killed. The activists hope to persuade officials to relocate the animals; the Defense Department says that would be too costly.

Canberra's local government leader, Jon Stanhope, said he understands that the killings distress many people. But he said more than 3.5 million kangaroos are commercially shot in the Outback each year. The meat is served in restaurants and is also used in pet food.

Pat O'Brien — president of the Wildlife Protection Association of Australia, whose patrons are the family of the late "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin — said government leaders miss the point.

"Shooting millions of kangaroos doesn't make it right," he said. "The national capital has a chance to lead by example and show that Australia has moved beyond solving all our wildlife management problems with a gun."

While the kangaroo population is growing, another Australian favorite — the Tasmanian devil — is threatened by a contagious cancer that has cut its population by up to 60 percent in a decade.

The disease, which causes disfiguring facial tumors, has spread so quickly that scientists last year estimated there might be no disease-free animals in the southern island state of Tasmania within five years.

The government of Tasmania, the only place where the devils exist in the wild, on Wednesday reclassified the animal from vulnerable to endangered status.

The change qualifies Tasmanian devils for greater government conservation aid and adds pressure on the federal government to revise its threatened species list.

"We are committed to finding an answer and saving the Tasmanian devil for Tasmanians and the world," state Primary Industries Minister David Llewellyn said in a statement.

Early European settlers named the devil for its spine-chilling screeches and reputed bad temper, and it gained fame as the Looney Tunes cartoon character Taz. Its larger cousin, the Tasmanian tiger, which like all marsupials carried its young in a pouch, was hunted to extinction in the 20th century.

Veterinarian Hugh Wirth, former president of the World Society for the Protection of Animals, said Australians have become more concerned about wildlife in the past 20 years.

He accused Defense Department officials of ignoring the growing kangaroo population until the animals were at risk of starvation.

"Impossibly high numbers have been allowed to develop, and then you have a mass slaughter. That's not close management and it's intolerable," Wirth said. "In a decade's time, we'll have another slaughter."

Dinosaur tracks found on Arabian Peninsula

The discovery of tracks of a large ornithopod dinosaur and a herd of 11 sauropods walking along a coastal mudflat in Yemen was reported in Wednesday's issue of the journal PLoS ONE.

"No dinosaur trackways had been found in this area previously. It's really a blank spot on the map," said Anne Schulp of the Maastricht Museum of Natural History in The Netherlands.

Only a few dinosaur fossils have been reported on the peninsula, including isolated bones from Oman and possible fragments of a long-necked dinosaur from Yemen, Schulp said.

Schulp conducted the study with Ohio University paleontologist Nancy Stevens and Mohammed Al-Wosabi of Sana'a University in Yemen.

Preserved in rocks at the site are the footprints of 11 small and large sauropods — long-necked, herbivorous dinosaurs that lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods — traveling together at the same speed.

A Yemeni journalist spotted one of the trackways in 2003. Stevens, Al-Wosabi and Schulp identified it as the footprint of an ornithopod, a large, common plant-eater that walked on its hind legs.

"It's an exciting find largely because it comes from a part of the world that is poorly known in terms of its vertebrate Mesozoic record," said Peter Makovicky, associate curator of dinosaurs at The Field Museum in Chicago. "This is part of the world with little body fossil record."

Scientists witness start of star's explosive death

On Jan. 9, astronomers used a NASA X-ray satellite to spy on a star already well into its death throes, when another star in the same galaxy started to explode. The outburst was 100 billion times brighter than Earth's sun. The scientists were able to get several ground-based telescopes to join in the early viewing and the first results were published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

"A star exploded right before my eyes," lead author Alicia Soderberg, an astrophysics researcher at Princeton University, said Wednesday in a teleconference.

She likened it to "winning the astronomy lottery. We caught the whole thing from start-to-finish on tape."

Another scientist, University of California at Berkeley astronomy professor Alex Filippenko, called it a "very special moment because this is the birth, in a sense, of the death of a star."

And what a death blast it is.

"As much energy is released in one second by the death of a star as by all of the other stars you can see in the visible universe," Filippenko said.

Less than 1 percent of the stars in the universe will die this way, in a supernova, said Filippenko, who has written a separate paper awaiting publication. Most stars, including our sun, will get stronger and then slowly fade into white dwarfs, what Filippenko likes to call "retired stars," which produce little energy.

The first explosion of this supernova can only be seen in the X-ray wave length. It was spotted by NASA's Swift satellite, which looks at X-rays, and happened to be focused on the right region, Soderberg said. The blast was so bright it flooded the satellite's instrument, giving it a picture akin to "pointing your digital camera at the sun," she said.

Soderberg said that by seeing it live in X-rays, astronomers on Earth learned of the supernova about a month before they normally would.

The chances of two simultaneous supernovae explosions so close to each other is maybe 1 in 10,000, Soderberg said. The odds of looking at them at the right time with the right telescope are, well, astronomical.

Add to that the serendipity of the Berkeley team viewing the same region with an optical light telescope. It took pictures of the star about three hours before it exploded.

This new glimpse of a supernova seems to confirm decades-old theories on how stars explode and die, not providing many surprises, scientists said. That makes the findings "a cool thing," but not one that fundamentally changes astrophysics, said University of California, Santa Cruz astrophysicist Stan Woosley, who wasn't part of the research.

The galaxy with the dual explosions is a run-of-the-mill cluster of stars, not too close and not too far from the Milky Way in cosmic terms, Soderberg said. The galaxy, NGC2770, is about 100 million light years away. One light year is 5.9 trillion miles.

The star that exploded was only about 10 million years old. It was the same size in diameter as the sun, but about 10 to 20 times more dense.

"The big stars live fast and die young," said Harvard astronomy professor Robert Kirshner. "We don't know if they leave a beautiful corpse."

The death of this star went through stages, with the core getting heavier in successive nuclear reactions and atomic particles being shed out toward the cosmos, Filippenko said. It started out in its normal life with hydrogen being converted to helium, which is what is happening in our sun. The helium then converts to oxygen and carbon, and into heavier and heavier elements until it turns into iron.

That's when the star core becomes so heavy it collapses in on itself, and the supernova starts with a shock wave of particles piercing through the shell of the star, which is what the Soderberg team captured on x-rays.

People at home can simulate how this shockwave works, Filippenko said.

Take a basketball and a tennis ball, get about five feet above the ground and rest the tennis ball on top of the basketball. Drop them together and the tennis ball will soar on the bounce. The basketball is the collapsing core and the tennis ball is the shockwave that was seen by astronomers, he said.

Scientists discover "frogamander" fossil

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The discovery of a "frogamander," a 290 million-year-old fossil that links modern frogs and salamanders, may resolve a longstanding debate about amphibian ancestry, Canadian scientists said on Wednesday.

Modern amphibians -- frogs, salamanders and earthworm-like caecilians -- have been a bit slippery about divulging their evolutionary ancestry. Gaps in the fossil record showing the transformation of one form into another have led to a lot of scientific debate.

The fossil Gerobatrachus hottoni or elderly frog, described in the journal Nature, may help set the record straight.

"It's a missing link that falls right between where the fossil record of the extinct form and the fossil record for the modern form begins," said Jason Anderson of the University of Calgary, who led the study.

"It's a perfect little frogamander," he said.

Gerobatrachus has a mixture of frog and salamander features, with fused ankle bones as seen only in salamanders, a wide, frog-like skull, and a backbone that resembles a mix of the two.

The fossil suggests that modern amphibians may have come from two groups, with frogs and salamanders related to an ancient amphibian known as a temnospondyl, and worm-like caecilians more closely related to the lepospondyls, another group of ancient amphibians.

"Frogs and salamanders share a common ancestor that is fairly removed from the origin of caecilians," Anderson said.

Gerobatrachus hottoni was discovered in Texas in 1995 by a group from the Smithsonian Institution that included the late Nicholas Hotton, for whom the fossil is named.

Anderson's team painstakingly removed layers of rock to reveal the anatomy of the skeleton.

"The fossil itself is almost perfectly complete," Anderson said.

"It died on its back. Its legs and arms were curled up on its belly and it's that part that weathered away."

While scientific opinion moves slowly, Anderson thinks the find will confirm the prevailing opinion that frogs and salamanders share a more modern ancestor.

"I think they (scientists) will be very happy with this as a resolution," he said.