Prawns, lean turkey slices and garlic cloves: a Dukan-friendly meal. (Photo by Leila Molana-Allen/CNS)

“Wow, you guys really know how to do a queue,” said the handsome man standing behind me. I looked down at the Tupperware box of prawns in my hands.

Moments later as I struggled to wipe off the prawn juice that I had just spilled down my arm before the doorman could see and decide I was insane, it struck me that I might be taking this a little far.

I was standing in a ridiculously long line outside a trendy New York biergarten on the first day of spring, waiting to buy an entry ticket to look at beer I couldn’t drink and smell sausages I couldn’t eat.

On my second day following the newest European slimming fad, the Dukan Diet, the severe restrictions were already starting to impinge on my life.

The diet operates on the same principle as the Atkins diet: Only protein and dairy can be eaten, meaning the body stops retaining water and resulting in rapid weight loss. However, unlike Atkins, Dukan imposes severe restrictions on fat content: only the leanest meats can be eaten, and only dairy with less than 2 percent fat is allowed. While this eliminates cholesterol concerns, it also severely limits options, making the plan much harder to follow.

A craze that swept Europe in 2010, Dukan is the newest go-to for celebrity slimmers. Interest peaked when it was revealed Kate Middleton and her mother followed the diet in the run-up to April’s royal wedding.

On April 19, the Dukan Diet hit the U.S. The system comprises a basic book or an enhanced package including personal coaching via a website, www.dukandiet.com. Membership is priced individually depending on weight loss needs. Weigh-ins and measurements must be logged daily, as well as specific details of any lapses.

The diet is divided into four phases. The Attack phase, imposed for two to five days depending upon how much weight the individual wants to lose, is pure protein consumption. Unlimited quantities of lean protein and fat-free dairy are allowed. This results in rapid weight loss as high as 10 pounds, although 2 to 3 pounds is the average.

During Attack, I was surprised to find I did not miss other foods. Perhaps the novelty of finding new surf-and-turf-and-air combinations was enough to keep me interested; roast chicken topped with prawns and lean ham on the side became a favorite.

At this stage the 1-2-pound loss seen daily provides ample motivation to persevere. More of a problem was my persistently dry mouth and furry tongue, which required far more water than the recommended daily two-liter allowance to keep at bay.

In the Cruise phase, certain vegetables are introduced, but only every other day. This lasts until the client reaches “true weight,” which the system calculates according to questions about weight history and body mass index. The weight loss slows down with the reintroduction of non-starchy vegetables that cause water retention.

For Consolidation, brown carbohydrates are gradually introduced. In Stabilization, all foods can be eaten in healthy amounts.

Oat bran, the only carbohydrate allowed in the first two phases, is an essential part of the diet. Despite research into the benefits of oat bran for weight loss, there is no scientific evidence of its efficacy. The program also relies heavily on artificial sweeteners and diet products, which have been linked with significant health problems.

The most common side effects include severe constipation punctuated by severe bouts of diarrhea, a dry mouth and white coating on the tongue, and constant thirst.

I experienced all these, as well as continuous exhaustion from the lack of carbohydrates. I became lethargic, negative and very antisocial. The combination of being too tired to go out, and knowing that if I did I would be unable to eat most of the things on my plate, transformed me into a virtual hermit. On my last day of following the plan, I went out to dinner to celebrate. I had one illicit spoonful of forbidden rice, and was shocked by the harsh pangs of guilt I felt for the rest of the evening.

As a normal person at a healthy weight, I lost 12 pounds in 10 days.

While results can be rapid, the smallest slip can result in an immediate gain. Having personally lost 90 pounds through portion control and exercise in the past year , I have learned the hard way that weight doesn’t stay off without an investment of effort. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 93 percent of people who lose weight regain it, and the most successful at maintaining are those who lose slowly.

Registered dietitian Tara Miller has serious reservations about the diet’s long-term effectiveness. “The initial loss may be of motivational benefit, but you’re likely to feel so miserable from lacking so many nutrients that it won’t be conducive to maintaining a good attitude for dieting,” she says.

Furthermore, Miller says the problem with diets that restrict some food groups but allow unlimited quantities of others is that they don’t teach good life habits. “By not talking about portion control, you’re missing out on a huge chunk of eating well and being healthy. The main thing to focus on is behavior change.”

Having followed the plan for 10 days, I can’t imagine how a person could stick to the entire program, which requires five days of Consolidation dieting per pound lost. With enough willpower, Dukan can evidently be life-changing. As for me, another day without bread might send me over the edge; I suppose I just don’t have the makings of a true Dukanier. On the plus side, I’ll always have cookies.

Email: ldm2135@columbia.edu

Michael DeFalco, left, and Dylan DeFalco. (Photo provided by Mary DeFalco)

About 10 weeks after their son Michael was born at 7 pounds, 3 ounces, he started showing symptoms of the condition. He had trouble digesting food and his height and weight were much lower than other infants his age. At 2 months old, he had gained only 2 pounds since his birth. His physician, after conducting a series of diagnostic tests, had determined that Michael had cystic fibrosis.

Nearly two years later, during Mary’s second pregnancy, she and Lou learned that their second child, Dylan, would also be born with the condition.

Today, Michael, 4, and Dylan, 2, live in Woodridge, Ill., and consume about 1,500 pills a month to aid their growth and digestion. They also depend on the latest advancements in science and medicine for new and potentially life-saving therapies.

“When you have two children living with cystic fibrosis, a cure cannot come fast enough,” said Mary DeFalco, 33, a stay-at-home mom, who helps coordinate her boys’ medications and breathing treatments. Lou DeFalco works as a senior manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, one of the world’s largest providers of business consulting services.

But finding enough money to research the disease is almost as hard as finding a cure, and the government budget crisis isn’t helping.

The continuing resolution bill passed by Congress in early April averted a government shutdown. But among its mandated $40 billion spending cuts are cuts to the  National Institutes of Health, which funded nearly $100 million in cystic fibrosis research last year.

Siphoning money from science and medical research,  two of America’s most precious commodities, may be setting a dangerous precedent.

Under the bill, the NIH – the world’s largest source of funding for medical research – took a $260 million hit, a 0.8 percent cut from the previous fiscal year. The National Science Foundation, which funds about one-fifth of all federally funded science research, lost $67 million, or 1 percent from last year. These cuts are in addition to a 0.2 percent across-the-board slash on all non-defense programs.

“All the easy cuts are gone – now we’re into the hard stuff,” said Chris Stenrud, the deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which comprises the National Institutes of Health and other operating divisions. “We would not have agreed to those cuts under better circumstances.”

Officials from the National Institutes of Health said they were not yet sure how the cuts would be allocated across the 27 institutes and centers.

While many experts argue the cuts are negligible, others remain fearful the federal government is tapping funds in places it shouldn’t, jeopardizing the nation’s role as a world leader and science and medical research.

“NIH funding has been crucial in making the advances we’ve made,” said Manu Jain, a cystic fibrosis expert and associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “A cut in funding to NIH will impact the pace of discovery and the breadth of investigation.”

Dr. Susanna McColley, the head of the division of pulmonary medicine and director of the Cystic Fibrosis Center at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, also said that government funding for medical research plays an important role in our understanding of diseases.

“The importance of NIH research funding is that it goes to answer the root causes of disease,” McColley said. “There has already been poor growth in NIH funding. I think we owe it to the people of the U.S. to be leaders in medical science.”

The National Institutes of Health has a rich history of funding research that has advanced scientific understanding of diseases. In 1989, scientist Francis Collins, now the director of the NIH, and his colleagues announced they had discovered that mutations in a specific gene caused cystic fibrosis. The institutes funded this study and other hallmark studies, including the Framingham Heart Study and Human Genome Project.

“The National Institutes of Health funds quite a bit of research that benefits cystic fibrosis patients,” said Eric Chamberlain, a grassroots advocacy coordinator at the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in Bethesda, Md., an organization that lobbied against cuts to this year’s research budget. “It’s important to make it clear to Congress these cuts will be harmful to the foundation.”

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which the DeFalcos and other families look to for support, has become a driving force on Capitol Hill and in laboratories. Last year, the foundation spent nearly $200,000 on lobbying efforts, according to the Senate Office of Public Records. And this spring, the foundation, while working in collaboration with Vertex Pharmaceuticals, announced favorable results from one of its late-stage clinical trials.

For the upcoming 2012 fiscal year, President Obama is requesting the National Institutes of Health receive almost $32 billion in funding, which is about $20 million less than last year’s request. The budget request has been sent to Congress for review, and the new fiscal year begins on Oct. 1.

Email: bma2124@columbia.edu

The presidential seal over the real west wing. (Image via Flickr under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Shortly after a domestic terrorist attack, the president took the lectern at a fundraising dinner. The lights were dim and the crowd restrained.

“More than any time in recent history, America’s destiny is not of our own choosing. We did not seek, nor did we provoke an assault on our freedom,” the Commander-in-Chief said. “When after having heard the explosion from their practice facility, they ran into the fire to help get people out. Ran into the fire. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight.”

But that speech wasn’t from any real president, it was from President Jed Bartlet on TV’s “The West Wing.” Rhetoric like that has inspired a new generation of young people working in Washington, D.C., even five years after the series stopped running in primetime.

“If it wasn’t for ‘The West Wing,’ I might be operating on somebody,” said Jamie Baker. Baker, 26, was a pre-med major at the University of Texas six years ago. As he was sitting in molecular biology, he said, “I thought to himself, ‘what am I doing, I hate this. I really love government.’”

Today he’s a legislative correspondent for Rep. Michael Burgess of Texas. He said after watching the entire “West Wing” series on DVD, he decided to switch majors to political science. And he’s still an avid fan.

Eshawn Rawley agrees. “It reinforced what we wanted to do with our careers,” said Rawley, 23, who works for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

“The West Wing” follows the senior staff of a Democratic president, the fictional Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen. It was known for its fast-moving dialogue, walk and talk scenes and high ratings, at least for a few years.

It ran for seven seasons on NBC, but has found new audiences on cable channels like Bravo and on DVDs. And, like some other programs that have long lives, it has influenced many people.

Joseph Saltzman, director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture Project at the University of Southern California, said that every so often, a movie or a television show like “The West Wing” will inspire people to go into government, journalism or another field. He said it’s not common, but it happens more than people think.

“In the 1970s, it was said that ‘All the President’s Men’ inspired a generation of young people to become investigative journalists,” said Saltzman. “Young people were inspired to go into politics in 1939 when “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” showed what one good man in Congress could do.”

Rawley said “The West Wing” still has many fans in Washington. “Most folks on the Hill, you can drop a ‘West Wing’ reference and they will pick up on it,” he said When tornadoes struck the South recently, “all I had to say to my coworkers was this is a ‘West Wing’ moment.” They knew Obama would be going, just like an episode when tornadoes tore through Iowa and Bartlet was quick to get on a jet.

In fact, the parallels to President Obama’s administration have been eerie — from the very beginning. The last two seasons of the series, in 2005 and 2006, focused on a minority Democratic candidate (played by Jimmy Smits) facing off against an older, established Republican (played by Alan Alda) in the election to replace Sheen.

Last month’s budget battle had a ‘West Wing’ counterpart, too — in season 5, Bartlet battles a new Republican Speaker of the House who wants to cut spending. Only that battle ended in a government shutdown, which was narrowly avoided in real life.

“It was very poignant because that kind of moment happened — the president sitting down with the speaker,” said another die-hard “West Wing” fan now in Washington, Elliot Bell-Krasner. Bell-Krasner served as a deputy field organizer in the Obama campaign and is now getting his master’s in public policy at American University.

Saltzman said that comparisons between the Bartlet and Obama presidencies are specious. He said it’s unlikely the current administration are emulating the program, “but since ‘The West Wing’ was an extremely realistic rendering of the office, it makes sense that many events and activities mirror the new reality.”

Bell-Krasner said that “The West Wing” may not have been his original inspiration to enter politics, but it certainly inspires him to keep going.

Part of being in the “West Wing” culture in D.C. is knowing which character you are on the show. “Every ‘West Wing’ fan will try to determine who they are on the show,” said Rawley. He said he’s a Sam Seaborn — Bartlet’s deputy communications director, played by Rob Lowe. A little romantic, very smart, and the ideological center of the Bartlet White House.

Bell Krasner sees himself as Leo — the president’s hard noised chief of staff played by John Spencer. And Baker says he sees himself differently as his mood changes.

Baker showed just how the program transcended party lines. The show was criticized for being too liberal — one critic called it “The Left Wing” — but politics doesn’t keep Baker from watching.

“I watch because these people are doing what they feel is right,” said Baker. He says it’s the same in politics: You might not agree, but you have respect because “people believe in what they’re doing.”

Email: avs2131@columbia.edu

Internet users are constantly prompted to create user names and passwords for a variety of different websites. (Photo by Meghan Keneally/CNS)

Jenna Kelly was full of imagination as a child. Growing up in Winchester, Mass., she and her two best friends forever — who, luckily, lived right next door— followed in the footsteps of generations of children before them and had a secret club. To protect the sacredness and importance of the secrets of 6-year-olds, they had a secret password (duh).

Their password was “Misty Daisy” — the winning combination of the groups’ two pet rabbits. Being the sophisticated children that they were, the girls even had a back up “security question,” which was the whistle that their parents used to get them to come in from outside.

“As any person conscious of password security knows, you need to vary your password often,” Kelly said. Other passwords included the names of the trees in their backyards.

As painfully unimportant as their secrets at the time were, the password and the whistle were part of the fun for Kelly and her friends. Decades and a computer age later, passwords are painfully necessary in daily life not only for little secrets but, also, basically for access to your life.

Billions of times a day, websites prompt us to create or recall user names and passwords for even the most seemingly unimportant tasks. Looking for a new apartment? Create a user name and password to view listings! Commenting on a news article? Create a user name and password to join the conversation! Buying? Banking? Friending? Password, password, password!

What started in childhood as silly fun is now essential, but the absurdity of the constraints brings it full circle — to something ridiculous.

In addition to the simply overwhelming number of passwords needed on a daily basis, another problem arises when every new password stipulating specific requirements (8-10 characters, punctuation marks, no punctuation marks, capitalization, fake words, no names, no sense!). It can no longer just be “Misty Daisy”: It has to be a fake word that involves numbers and capitals, so maybe M!5tyDa!5y.

Most people just give up and stick with one or two really genius passwords that they create and can handle memorizing. Even Kelly, who works at Google in San Francisco, has fewer than 10 passwords and admits that they are all  dangerously similar to one another. A 2010 Consumer Reports study said that over two-thirds of respondents use either the same password or a variation of the same password for all of their accounts.

In the tech world, this represents a cardinal sin.

One way that people try to help themselves when they try to remember what password they used for what account is by sticking to certain categories when dealing with certain accounts. When Laura Palmer, a Manhattan-based consultant, has to come up with a new password for a work account, she sticks to her tried and true pattern: Combine a pet name with the street address of a previous home. Having grown up on a farm and moved around a lot in college, Palmer has plenty of options.

Another interviewee (who, like others, demanded privacy to protect his passwords) always bases his passwords around weather patterns, using combinations that include numbers with words like “sleet,” “hurricane ”or “tsunami,” in hopes that he would be able to come up with the root word eventually.

Lately, corporations have even begun to demand that employees’ passwords automatically expire every three months, so they are forced to create passwords, remember them briefly, and then forget them soon after.

Then the vicious cycle begins again.

Morgan Breck, a 23-year-old investment banker at Deutsche Bank in New York, where such a  system is in place, said that at this point she just surrenders to the process.

“I think it’s a huge pain but I always just use the ‘Forgot Password’ option and have the program email me a new password,” Breck said.

When looking to link a password with a personal memory that  will be remembered forever, many are tempted to use names or dates related to former flings; the next obvious thought is the inevitability of an awkward conversation later on.

One married man had a private password that included the initials and birthdate of a former girlfriend; when a situation came where he had to share his password with his wife, the jig was up and an undeniably awkward conversation ensued. Two other interviewees used dates of the anniversaries of previous relationships for their bank PIN numbers, but luckily their current “other halves” were more understanding.

Crazy mnemonic devices and random passwords are really the only an attempt by people are trying to cope with an deliberately maddening system. One apt comparison would be to the long line at airport security: Everyone (in their right mind) agrees that you’ve got to be strict on security, and is willing to do what’s necessary, but who truly wants to take off a  belt, shoes and watch every time through? No one. You do it anyway. The same is true with passwords: Try as you might to cheat the system by coming up with one that’s easy to remember or simply by reusing the same one over and over, in the end, you’re going to be the only loser.

Email: mek2182@columbia.edu

Sandy Flynn at her home in Buffalo. (Photo courtesy of Sandy Flynn)

Sandy Flynn didn’t realize she was transgender until she was 60 years old. She had married as a man, and although they never had children, Flynn kept her urge to be female hidden from her wife until the divorce.

When she decided that she wanted to transition, or have gender reassignment surgery, she discovered that the procedure could cost up to $30,000 in the United States. Not having those kinds of resources, and knowing her surgery wouldn’t be covered by her health insurance, Flynn had the surgery in Thailand for only $9,000. The surgery went well, she says, but the Thai doctors failed to give her healing instructions.

“They didn’t tell me anything about what to do after,” says Flynn. “I got severely infected.”

Thousands of transgender people across America face similar problems when they transition. The gender reassignment surgery is expensive, but in order to transition completely, many other operations are often necessary.

Although the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association have deemed transition-related surgeries medically necessary, most health insurance companies have built-in exclusions that prevent coverage for these surgeries, as well as coverage for hormones and other transition-related care. As a result, many transgender people lack the resources to pay for surgeries and hormones, so instead, they turn to black-market surgery or silicone injections, all of which carry extreme health risks.

According to the Human Rights Campaign, a lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender watchdog, 69 companies provided their employees with transgender-inclusive health insurance benefits in 2009, including Disney, Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola and Campbell Soup. However, the vast majority of employers and health insurance companies do not offer this type of policy.

“If it was more reasonable, I don’t see why anyone would go through the black market,” says Flynn, who is now 68. “I fell between the cracks. But we’re sort of like the forgotten people. We’re on the cusp, and we have to take what we can get.”

Jeri Hughes of Transgender Health Empowerment Inc., says that most health-care companies won’t pay for transition-related care. “The bottom line is, some policies exclude anything that has to do with gender identity,” she says. “They won’t pay for hormones, anything, even if a doctor prescribes it.”

Susan Pisano, vice president of communications for America’s Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, which represents 1,300 health insurers and 200 million Americans, says the country’s health insurance crisis is the main reason most health care providers can’t insure transition-related care.

“Difficult decisions are made every day about what to cover and what not to cover,” she says. “Companies are not going to be able to afford insurance for every possibility. The rising costs of health care make it hard to afford coverage for the things that are covered.”

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, says that the lack of health care coverage means that more and more transgender people are forced to seek out dangerous procedures. “If the health care system doesn’t work around the patient, the patient will work around the health care system,” she says.

Keisling says health insurance companies sometimes interpret the exclusions to mean any sort of care for transgender people. “Often, the exclusions are interpreted to mean any kind of sex-related care, such as mammograms or gynecological exams for transgender men,” says Keisling. “I am currently working a case for a transgender woman who is a federal employee. Her doctor ordered a blood test for anemia and the insurance company refused to pay for it because it was transgender blood.”

Peter Sprigg, Senior Fellow for Policy Studies at the Family Research Council, a Christian organization that lobbied against including transition-related surgeries in the Affordable Care Act, says that transition-related care is not medically necessary. “We don’t believe that taxpayers should be asked to pay for elective surgery, and we believe that sex-change surgery is the ultimate form of elective surgery,” says Sprigg.

Sprigg says that the Family Research Council considers transgender people to be suffering from a mental disease or disorder. “The appropriate treatment for gender identity disorder is psychological therapy to conform their subjective mental state to the objective reality of their biological sex,” he says. Sprigg cites a 1979 Johns Hopkins University study by Jon Meyer and conservative Catholic Dr. Paul McHugh that found there was no real benefit to gender reassignment surgery as evidence.

But Dr. Heino F.L. Meyer-Bahlburg’s 2009 article for the American Psychiatric Association, “From Mental Disorder to Iatrogenic Hypogonadism: Dilemmas in Conceptualizing Gender Identity Variants as Psychiatric Conditions,” found that “McHugh’s etiologic formulations are not based on solid empirical evidence, and that the pessimistic evaluation of SRS outcome is not shared by follow-up studies.”

Dr. Harold Reed, an urologist and gender reassignment surgeon, says it’s not just a matter of insurance companies covering transition-related care, but paying the doctors enough to perform the surgeries. “One sphere is not just to get insurance companies to recognize and cover it, but if they’re not providing the doctors reasonable compensation, no doctors will want to do the surgeries,” he says. “We can’t neglect these people. We can’t turn our backs on them when they have support from their therapists and doctors.”

Mason Davis, executive director of the Transgender Law Fund, says the government shouldn’t dictate health care decisions. “In the end, I think even the Family Research Council would agree that bureaucrats shouldn’t be making decisions about health care,” he says. “That decision should be made between a doctor and their patient.”

Davis says that covering transition-related surgeries wouldn’t be a huge strain on taxpayers. “What’s important to remember is that there really aren’t many of us, and we’re not that expensive,” says Davis, who is a transgender male. “We’re better off having people get their health care from the system, not on the streets.”

NOTE: This post has been updated to correct the spelling of the last name of the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. It is Keisling, not Kiesling.

Email: sta2346@columbia.edu

(Photo courtesy of Protivent LLC)

He was being paid to participate in a study to test the absorption of a pill, a test that involved providing feces samples and abstaining from the use of alcohol or drugs. Those conditions were typical, but a problem arose when the scientists conducting the study abruptly changed the schedule. Rather than concluding before Christmas, leaving the guinea pigs with money in hand to celebrate the holidays and debauch as they saw fit, the new schedule required the subjects to lead their monastic lives through the new year.

As rumblings of discontent reverberated through the group of roughly 20 test subjects, the idea took hold to petition the doctors for an increase in pay — or else. Faced with the prospect of an inconclusive study if the guinea pigs walked, the doctors folded and gave each one an additional $800.

In most professions, such an event would be unremarkable. But in more than 20 years of guinea pigging and advocating for the rights of medical test subjects, it is Helms’ proudest moment. “I was just walking on air,” he recalled. “You can write all the cool little anecdotal stories you want, but when you get a raise for 20 guys, it’s much more substantial.”

The incident is particularly clear in his mind because it’s one of the few occurrences of successful organizing that he can recall. That’s because no union exists for guinea pigs, no organization that can advocate for their needs or see to their protection.

Professional guinea pigs, those who participate in multiple studies (sometimes at the same time), are a faceless class of workers. No one even knows precisely how many there are. While the site eHow now has a page on how to become a test subject, it wasn’t until Helms started a zine, a type of newsletter that became popular in the mid ’90s, that guinea pigs began to consider themselves professionals at all.

Helms started the zine, which was called Guinea Pig Zero, in 1995 after friends with similar types of low skill jobs began circulating their own tales of discontent. “This was all part of the culture of west Philly at the time,” he said.

There was Dishwasher Pete who turned the experience of being a dishwasher into something funny.  There was Tempslave Jeff Kelly who mused on life as a temp worker.  “I decided that being a guinea pig was another crummy occupation that had its own culture and its own history,” Helms said.

Sixteen years later, having allowed Guinea Pig Zero to cease production with the release of an anthology in 2002, Helms’ idea of guinea pigs as a more formally recognized occupation has still not come to pass. But the issues that piqued his interest have not disappeared, and he still does what he can for the cause, speaking at conferences and conducting interviews.

Part of the failure to organize has been legal: It is difficult for the guinea pigs to form a union because they work for disparate laboratories on short-term, nonemployee contracts. They could form an association, but these are typically ineffective, according to Marshall Babson, a labor lawyer at Seyfarth Shaw LLP and former member of the National Labor Relations Board.

“There are federations or associations who bind together, without an obligation for the employer, but without a union and collective bargaining it’s very difficult for them to control terms,” he said.

Without a union, greater risk is heaped on medical test subjects, who are already dangerously exposed. “After the hamster, it’s you,” said Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a group that focuses on educating guinea pigs and research scientists alike about the risks. “The person doing it is a gambler for sure,” she said.

Those risks are especially significant given what Sharav calls the federal Food and Drug Administration’s poor record of protecting guinea pigs.  “It seems that the F.D.A. is only capable of hiring blind people who are incapable of lifting a blanket, looking underneath and seeing the chicanery,” she said.

Worse yet, there is limited accountability for the laboratories that conduct the tests. “With animal subjects, the industry provides a report to Congress, an exact number of how many hamsters died, or were made ill etc., but there’s no requirement with human beings,” she added.

While France has a central registration system that tracks human test subjects to prevent their involvement in too many studies, the United States has no such system. This means that guinea pigs can easily hide their past work and sign up for numerous studies.

“People will travel from state to state, from Madison, Wis.,  to Illinois, swapping stories about how to clean your blood so that you can pass out of one study into another,” Helms said.

Jeff Ventura, a spokesman for the FDA, pointed to the more than 1,000 inspections of research laboratories conducted annually by the organization.

“Oversight of clinical trials involving FDA-regulated products includes the sponsor, monitor, clinical investigator, IRB and FDA,” he said, referring to the Institutional Review Board. “Under FDA’s regulations, each party is assigned various responsibilities in the clinical trials process to help ensure human subjects are protected and the resulting data is accurate and reliable.”

The essential contradiction of Helms’ vision is that while it aims to increase oversight and offer greater protection for medical test subjects it would also end the rogue culture that has made guinea pigging such an appealing profession to so many. “When you’re a guinea pig, you can do one big study that will take you three weeks or a month and a half, and then you have some money and you can do anything you want,” Helms said.

Email: zf2123@columbia.edu

Wallace, then 34, placed 16th in the 1,000-meter time trial event and credited the chamber — which creates a low-oxygen environment that simulates the effects of living at altitude — with much of his success. But the bulky chamber wasn’t exactly portable. So Wallace, who has a background in mechanical engineering, decided to fix that.

Thus was born the altitude tent.

A Hypoxico tent is one option for altitude training. (Photo courtesy of Matthew Eckert of Hypoxico)

Hypobaric chambers, which remove oxygen — and similar normabaric hypoxic tents, which replace normal air with lower-oxygen air to retain normal pressure — have developed a dedicated following. It’s harder to breathe in high altitude, and that’s exactly the point.

The tents, most of which sell for roughly $4,000, are usually used at night, covering a bed like a cross between a mosquito net and a boy-in-a-bubble environment. A user manipulates oxygen levels by selecting an “elevation.” Hardcore enthusiasts can log additional daytime hours, working or napping — or, if they also have a mask system, exercising.

With a wide range of products on the market, the tents have caught on among professionals and amateurs alike: Wallace estimated that 70 percent of artificial hypoxia users are amateurs and that seven of the top 10 in a recent Tour de France were customers.

It’s a new way to achieve a longstanding goal: As early as the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City (7,350 feet above sea level), it became clear that altitude training could dramatically improve performance.

When, for example, Kip Keino, from the hills of Kenya, beat world record holder Jim Ryun in the 1,500-meter race by the largest margin in the event’s history, athletes quickly realized that it might be in their best interest to relocate to higher regions.  The conventional wisdom held that because low levels of oxygen force the body to produce more oxygen-carrying red blood cells, training at altitude could produce surprising bursts of energy at sea level.

In 1997, Dr. Benjamin Levine published a seminal study on the idea of “living high, training low.”  He examined 39 competitive runners split into three groups: live high-train high, live low-train low and live high-train low.  The last group gained the most speed over the 10-week period, which could be explained by the physiological gains from spending most of their rest time accumulating extra blood cells, plus the fitness gains from working in an environment where they could push themselves without becoming exhausted quickly.

“It’s a form of natural blood doping, if you will,” Levine said.

Even before  Levine’s study, Wallace had been intrigued by altitude training.  Before the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Calif. (233 feet above sea level), he moved to Colorado Springs, Colo. (6,035 feet above sea level) for a few weeks.  As a member of the British national team, though, he could not use the U.S. Olympic training facilities. He abandoned the plan until 1991, when he rented a cabin on the mountain and drove downhill to train.

After finishing second at the World Championships in 1991 and 1992, he bought his first chamber three years later and then devised the less expensive altitude tent, selling the first few to friends for $5,800. He founded Wallace Altitude Tent Systems, then moved to Hypoxico and finally to Colorado Altitude Training, both previously existing hypoxia retailers.

It’s almost ironic, then, given its ties to Olympic history, that artificial hypoxia has been banned in athlete housing at the Olympics since 2000.  “That’s politics,” said Levine, “not physiology.”

A representative from the World Anti-Doping Agency confirmed by email only that hypoxic tents were not prohibited in general.

Heart patients can benefit from high-altitude methods, as well. The Einstein-Montefiore Medical Center in New York City uses Hypoxico’s hypobaric chambers to give patients a good workout without doing anything very high-impact.

But not everyone is quite so high on altitude tents.

David Nader, a 41-year-old cyclist from San Mateo, Calif. (15 feet above sea level), bought a Hypoxico tent a few years ago.  A clinical researcher with a background in exercise physiology who has been racing since 2000, he lasted only six months.

“It was actually really stressful, because at night when you are sleeping and recovering from training you’re actually imposing an additional stress on your body,” he said.  “I started getting sick a lot.  So it ended up hurting me.”

Jenny Slawta, a 47-year-old associate professor of health, physical education and leadership at Southern Oregon University (1,895 feet above sea level),also  experienced some side effects, but with much more positive results.

Her performance at the annual Mount Evans Hill Climb in Colorado — the highest paved road in North America at 14,200 feet — made it worth it for her.  She finished first overall in the women’s category, setting the record for 40-plus women’s by 17 minutes and beating the fastest time in the pro category by 30 seconds.

“So that was a pretty good year for me,” she said with a laugh.  “I knew I’d done it right.”

A number of sports medicine professionals affiliated with the American College of Sports Medicine agreed in interviews that they were uncomfortable speaking broadly in favor of or against artificial hypoxia, because the effects are so individual-specific.  No one cited specific health risks.

Although Levine supports the technique, he is wary of machines that simulate low oxygen levels.  Simply sleeping in an altitude tent is not enough, he said.  “You need at least 12 hours a night, if not more, to get enough hypoxic exposure to make the red cells go up,” he said.

Wallace agreed, adding a caveat: People who live at high altitudes cannot train as hard as their sea-level opponents.  “I think there’s little doubt that someone who uses an altitude tent for all of their sleeping hours has closed the gap on someone who lives in Colorado Springs,” he said.

Email: sea2141@columbia.edu

Octavian Setz Stallings, 17 months old, has few blue garments in his wardrobe. (Photo courtesy of Ariel Meadow Stallings.)

There isn’t much about 11-week-old Piper Monosoff that says she’s a girl. Her nursery is painted brown, yellow and orange; she travels around in a green stroller; her wardrobe is an assortment of quirky stripes and polka dots.

“I want people to see her as a baby, not a baby girl,” said her mother, Sara Steinbach, of Portland, Ore. “I don’t want people to expect things from her or treat her a certain way because of their preconceived notions of what girls are like.”

Steinbach often faces the question: How old is your son? But that is a small inconvenience toward the greater goal. Many couples like Steinbach and her husband have sidestepped an all-pink lace and frills wardrobe for girls and are steering clear of monster trucks for boys in an attempt to avoid gender stereotypes in the formative years of a child’s development. Averse to pigeonholing children into society’s “blue boy boxes” and “pink girl boxes,” they’re practicing what they call gender-neutral parenting, a philosophy designed to give children the freedom to express their own likes, dislikes and interests, and ultimately, to determine their own identities.

This process now starts even before the baby is born. At their recent 20-week ultrasound, New York parents-to-be Joey Drucker and Debra Flashenberg sat with their faces turned away from the sonogram screen.

“If we found out we were having a boy, we would be flooded with cars and sports stuff; and if we were having a girl, it would be pink bows and princess dresses,” said 34-year-old Drucker, who convinced his wife to wait until birth to find out whether they were having a girl or a boy. “I want my child to be able to choose for himself or herself what is fun, what is interesting, what is creative.”

Drucker, a master’s student in social work, developed his parenting ideology after a class in human sexuality, where he learned the difference between sex and gender, the former determined at birth and the latter, socially learned. Sex is binary in nature, he explained, divided in a “black-and-white way” into male and female, but gender is not.

“Gender is certainly a spectrum,” said Judith Stacey, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. “What is masculine and feminine differs from society to society and culture to culture, and even historically.”

She believes that while men and women have some innately different predilections, “gender-enforcing” parenting magnifies these differences in ways that can be oppressive. A boy with a nurturing side, for instance, might be deprived of the opportunity to explore and develop it if he is surrounded by balls to bounce and soldiers to assemble, but can’t play with his sister’s dolls, Stacey said.

Dr. Lise Eliot, a professor in the department of neuroscience at Chicago Medical School and the author of “Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps and What We Can Do About It,” says gender-specific parenting has the effect of “reducing the palette” of a child’s skills. She draws a cause-and-effect connection between the low writing and reading levels of boys and the fact that they tend to spend more time with cars than with people and books.

“What you do with your time is what your brain becomes good at,” said Eliot. “So what we call our children, how we talk to them, what they wear, what they do, wires up their circuits in a specific way.”

She suggests deliberate “cross-training” of children, a practice that involves talking to boys, singing to them, reading to them, and making eye contact with them; and getting girls to be more active by encouraging them to build, hop, skip and run.  Eliot concedes that a completely gender-neutral upbringing is a “fantasy,” given parents’ limited sphere of influence once the child begins to interact with peers and the outside world.

“But remember that the child is learning from birth,” she added. “Early influences can have a lasting impact.”

Ariel Meadow Stallings, 35, who runs a blog called offbeatmama.com, has observed that gender-neutral parenting has become a hot topic of discussion in the parenting community. In February, a reader posed a question about whether or not to wait to find out the sex of her baby. In just two days, over 150 comments poured in, many favoring a stereotype-free environment.

Stallings, who has a 17-month-old boy named Octavian Setz Stallings, has strong feelings against “handing down an identity” to children, in her case shaped partially by the fact that her mother and mother-in-law are both in same-sex relationships. Determined to give her son a “gender-neutral start-off,” Stallings keeps her distance from trucks, balls and blues.

“So many assumptions about gender roles are just entrenched in our culture,” said Stallings. “Being gender neutral encourages people to pause and think about their perceptions.”

It was by way of a backlash against these perceptions that Marianne Mullen started Polkadot Patch, an online boutique that specializes in gender-neutral clothing. When Mullen was pregnant, she chose not to learn the sex of her baby, a decision that changed dramatically the topic of conversation at her baby shower. Her friends and family complained about being “stuck,” not knowing what to buy without knowing if it was a boy or a girl. That stirred something in Mullen and led to the birth of Polkadot Patch.

“We purposely challenge those gender stereotypes,” said Mullen, 42. “We want to make a statement that it’s OK for boys to like rainbows and girls to like monkeys.”

Small online stores aside, finding gender-neutral merchandise in mainstream markets can be a challenge. Cassandra Snider had found that the world of shopping for infants is divided between aisles of pink and aisles of blue; the soccer ball clothes on one side and the Barbie doll clothes on the other. She tends to shop in the boys’ section, which she finds has more gender-neutral colors and accessories. Her daughter, Medea Snider, 7 months old, has a nature-themed room — blue, green and brown.

“If she chooses to play with dolls when she grows up, I’ll happily buy her dolls,” Snider said. “But I don’t want to tell her to like dolls.”

Drucker, who has decided against finding out the sex of his baby for just this reason, is often faced with incredulous expressions and the inevitable question — How will you prepare if you don’t know?

“I know the baby will eat, sleep and poop,” Drucker says. “I don’t need to know anything beyond that.”

Email: nsm2127@columbia.edu

Rare books at Michael R. Thompson Rare Books. (Photo courtesy of Michael R. Thompson)

While the digital age has been kind to readers, offering e-books, online shopping and instant access, many retailers have not fared as well. When Borders filed for bankruptcy in February, it announced it would close one-third of its stores and shift focus to e-books and nonbook products. Other booksellers continue to modify and tweak their strategies to cope with the growth of digital options.

But in one niche of the literary marketplace, print still rules — and always will. Rare book dealers and experts don’t necessarily agree about how the digital future will affect their business, but few say they are threatened by it — especially since the price of rare books is usually based on their availability.

“The fact that actual books are going to become more scarce really helps us doesn’t it?” says Kim Herzinger, a retired literature professor and owner of  Left Bank books in New York City. “Books are going to be seen more and more as pretty and special objects,” Herzinger says. “No one is going to say, ‘I want to put my iPad on the shelf so that people can see what nice books I have.’ ”

Digital books may sell at a discount, but dealers expect that physical first editions of established collectibles will continue to appreciate. Scarce classics like a first edition of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” already fetch thousands of dollars. A copy of the first folio edition of Shakespeare plays sold for more than $5 million in 2006.

“It is a completely different market,” says Michael DiRuggiero, co-owner of the Manhattan Rare Book Co. in New York City. “The idea is that you want a piece of history. The first edition is the closest you get to the birth of a specific idea, cultural or scientific.” He adds, “People buy them as collectible physical objects rather than to read.”

While smaller print runs may lead to the kind of scarcity that increases a rare book’s value, most dealers advise against buying up contemporary first editions in hopes of scoring a future winner. “It is very risky,” says Michael Thompson, founder of Michael R. Thompson Rare Books in Los Angeles.  “The odds are not on your side.”

Tell that to someone lucky enough to have bought — and kept — a hardcover first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” by J.K. Rowling, published in the U.K. with a first-print run of only 500 copies.T he first editions in the U.K. have sold for around $25,000, according to the rare booksellers consulted.  (The book was later later published in the United States as “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”)

The Harry Potter books are a unique example. “The perfect storm of what makes a rare modern book is an unknown author’s first book gets a small print run, and then it kind of takes off,” says DiRuggiero. By the time reader interest in the books really took off, the first editions were long gone. The result: an instant classic.

Still, predicting such trends is difficult — and dealers warn that some popular bestsellers, like “The Da Vinci Code,” by Dan Brown, initially seem like good investments but then fail to maintain their value.

“People were paying through the nose for first editions of that book,” says Amir Naghib, owner of Captain Ahab’s Rare Books in Miami. Unsigned first editions of “The Da Vinci Code” were valued between $200 and $400 in the mid-2000s, says Naghib. Signed copies sold then for as much as $5,000, he adds.

Less than a decade later, Naghib says he has seen first editions of the book selling on eBay for around $30. And a dealer he knows has priced a signed, pre-publication, advance copy at $100.

It’s not only first editions that have value to collectors. A later edition might sometimes be worth more if it offers something in great demand, such as unique inscription by the author, says Susan Benne, executive director of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America.

Take “No Country for Old Men,” a best seller by Cormac McCarthy that was subsequently made into a film. Naghib in Miami offers an unsigned first edition of the book for $125 and a later edition priced at $650. The difference? The later edition is signed by Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem, the lead actors in the film, which won the 2008 Academy Award for best picture. That award plus Bardem’s Oscar for his performance in the film add a uniqueness to the later copy that supersedes the price of the first edition, says Naghib.

And that’s something you can’t get in the Kindle edition.

NOTE: This article has been updated to correct the name of the Manhattan Rare Book Co. (not Manhattan Rare Books), and to remove an age for Left Bank books.

E-mail:  aal2137@columbia.edu

Suddenly, you know far more than necessary about their personal habits — when they are “getting a burger at Shake Shack” or “at New York Sports Club” or “at work.”

9:57 a.m. No Joey. (Photo by Stephanie Apstein/CNS)

Maybe passive stalking is just another fact of  life in the 21st century, when everything from your cellphone to the ATM keeps track of you. “There are a lot of conveniences to these technologies,” said Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But convenience comes with a price. “If you create this record, you’re not the only one who has it,” Jeschke added.

In fact, more than half of people with mobile devices that include geo-location worry about losing privacy, Webroot, an Internet security firm, says.  Yet more than a quarter of the users polled have shared their whereabouts with people other than friends.

Burglars comb the obituaries to find empty houses, to know where you weren’t. But what if someone wanted to know where you were?

I decided to answer the question by tracking a stranger online.

It couldn’t be hard. After all, there are websites devoted to pointing out how easy it is. Pleaserobme.com, for example, has a live stream from users who publish Foursquare locations to Twitter. The idea, as the site’s mission statement says, is “everybody can get this information.”

10:35 a.m. No Joey. (Photo by Stephanie Apstein/CNS)

My first step was to sign up as Foursquare user 8152292, also known as Steph (I declined to provide more information).

Next I discovered maps with pins corresponding to users’ exact locations.

As I scrolled, I discovered that “View tweets nearby” shows you any tweet published from nearby coordinates. “Mayor” shows who visits a location most often. “Who’s here” displays the user-selected picture of each user who has checked in in the past three hours. You can click on a user to view a public Foursquare profile, and learn which social networking sites are linked.

But just as the GPS in your car sometimes thinks you’re driving on a parallel road, Foursquare also can guess wrong. To compensate, it offers a list of all the nearby locations, so you  also can also see from your location “who’s at” places within a several-block radius. From the comfort of my apartment, I searched for “mayors” who checked in most frequently at locations near me.

And … bingo. I found a likely candidate.

Joey D. lived in the Bronx, worked near my apartment and appeared to frequent local eateries for lunch. His Twitter feed — which gave me his last name — consisted exclusively of updates pushed from his Foursquare.

10:42 a.m. No Joey. (Photo by Stephanie Apstein/CNS)

I could see when he got to work, when he left. I knew when he went to the gym and when he went to McDonald’s. I knew his cellphone provider and even the kind of phone he owned.

His Facebook was also connected — and his public profile had a nice, high-resolution picture.

To ease into the stalker thing, rather than surprise him at, say, work, I went to his favorite deli the next morning. There was nowhere to sit, so I waited on the bench at a bus stop and conducted surveillance for almost two hours.

But he didn’t show up. Or if he did, I missed him somehow.

For three days.

Obsessed, I started keeping a constant watch on his Twitter page and darted out of the house every time he updated his location near me.

But I still kept missing him — from a Starbucks to a bank —  and whenever he failed to check in at his next stops, the trail went cold.

Two weeks went by.  I narrowed my focus. Although his work address was available, several different businesses were in his building — two cafes and a slew of doctors’ offices. Despite aggressive Googling and a more thorough evaluation of his Facebook, I couldn’t figure out his actual job.

So I camped out for hours at a time in the two cafes, hoping he might stop for a coffee. I consumed my body weight in hot chocolate so the waitresses wouldn’t think I was a deadbeat. I sat near windows and stared at passers-by. I tried to sneak into off-limits areas in case he worked in one of the storerooms or something.

Frustrated, I finally adopted a 20^th-century stalking technique: I called the businesses in his building and asked for Joey.

“Jerry?”

“No, Joey.”

“Never heard of him. Sorry.”

Maybe our privacy is safer than I thought. While passive stalking is easy, closing the deal can be hard.

Eventually, I contacted Joey through Facebook.  I offered to meet him near his work — and included the address, just for good measure.

“I don’t know how you obtained my work address,” he wrote back, with more than a trace of hostility.

Concerned about his safety — which seemed fair, given the circumstances — he didn’t want to meet a stranger in person. I gave him my number.

A few hours later the phone rang: Joey.

It turned out he had stalked me too: He’d decided I wasn’t a threat after checking my LinkedIn profile.

“Did you realize that all that stuff was public?” I asked.

“I figured that only people who were my friends could see,” he answered.

He said he was a 31-year-old (which I already knew, because his Facebook listed his high school graduation year) assistant to an orthopedic surgeon (ohhh) who felt himself reasonably savvy when it came to Facebook and Myspace, but confided that he’d signed up for Foursquare without a vast knowledge of the privacy settings.

Would our interaction change his behavior?

“I think you’ve creeped me out sufficiently,” he said, and vowed to make his Twitter feed private.

Email: sea2141@columbia.edu