Medicine

Broadcast journalist John Merrow. He's the anchor and Executive Editor of "The Merrow Report" a quarterly series of documentaries on PBS that examines education and surrounding issues. Their latest documentary is "Attention Deficit Disorder: A Dubious Diagnosis?" In the documentary Merrow disputes the widely held belief that Ritalin, the drug given to children with Attention Deficit Disorder, is not "dangerous and addictive." Merrow also found that the drug has been overprescribed, and that some kids have begun to abuse it.

Neurologist William Langston. His work plunged him into a medical mystery, and a hot political controversy about the ethics of medicine. In 1982 Langston was called in to examine a number of "frozen" patients, young men and women in the San Francisco Bay Area who suddenly could neither move or speak, though conscious. Langston recognized the signs of Parkinson's disease, and determined that these patients had all used the same batch of tainted heroin. Langston prescribed L-dopa, a treatment for Parkinson's which only provided short-term relief.

Nurse Christina Schmitz. She volunteers with the international medical relief organization, Doctors Without Borders. Schmitz was in Srebrenica when it fell. She has also volunteered with Doctors Without Borders in Croatia, Liberia, Kurdistan, South Sudan, and Chechnya. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)

Dr. Andrew Weil. He is one of the world's leading authorities on health, healing and medicine. His latest book Spontaneous Healing (Knopf) explores how to discover and enhance our body's natural ability to maintain and heal itself. Dr. Weil is currently Associate Director of the Division of Social Perspectives in Medicine. He also has a private practice, based at the Center for Integrative Medicine at Tucson, where he treats patients from around the world.

Love is the founding member of the Breast Cancer Coalition and founding director of the UCLA Breast Cancer, which is one of the world's leading breast treatment facilities. Her book Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book (Addison Wesley) is said to be one of the most important books in women's health in the last decade. A new, updated edition has just been published.

Journalist Laurie Garrett has recently returned from Zaire, where many people have died due to the spread of the Ebola virus. She is the author of the new book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. She talks about how people in Zaire changed their behaviors in order to curtail the spread of the Ebola virus.

Francis has worked on the AIDS epidemic since 1981, and is currently working on developing a vaccine. He was portrayed by Matthew Modine in "The Band Played On" and was a consultant on "Outbreak." He's worked for the Centers for Disease Control, and has researched Ebola outbreaks in Africa.

The Canadian writer has a new novel called "The Cunning Man." It follows the life of a Toronto-based doctor during World War 2 who witnesses the death of a father at the High Altar. The Washington Post has called it "one of [the] author's most entertaining and satisfying novels." Davies, now 81, has had three successive careers -- he began as an actor, then was a journalist and newspaper publisher, and in 1981 retired as professor of the Massy college at the University of Toronto.

Biologist Edward Golub's book "The Limits of Medicine," explores the history of medical advances and argues that medicine's new goal should be to extend health, not life span. There will be no "magic bullet" for today's major illnesses like there was for earlier scourges like polio, smallpox and diphtheria, he says. Golub was a professor of biology at Purdue University for twenty years and a director of research in the pharmaceutical industry for five years.

We continue our interview with Laurie Garrett. Her new book about communicable diseases is called "The Coming Plague."