food and drug administration

Ever hear of the endowment effect? In its simplest terms, this refers to the added worth that humans give to things that they own. Studies have shown, for example, that people will sell a product they own for a much higher price than they'd be willing to pay for it when buying from someone else. Can you relate? It sounds like fairly predictable human behavior. But to what extremes can this endowment effect influence our eating habits? This is where it gets interesting.

What if you could carve off a chunk of the most succulent slab of steak you´ve ever eaten, clone a bull from it, then produce weeks of identically delectable dinners?

Launch the slideshow to learn how the seafood bandage works.

When it comes to war wounds, red is dead. Stop the bleeding, and you save the soldier. It´s a simple idea that´s driving a budding industry for fast-acting blood-clotting agents.

Daily insulin injections make it hard
for many diabetics to control blood sugar well enough to prevent serious complications like blindness and kidney failure. Now Pfizer and Sanofi-Aventis offer up the painless Exubera, an inhaler that delivers aerosolized insulin to the lungs, which quickly absorb the drug over their large surface area. A single puff just before meals can stabilize blood sugar as effectively as a shot. A Food and Drug Administration panel voted to approve Exubera this fall based on results from more than 52 clinical trials conducted over 10 years.

I swipe an alcohol-soaked gauze pad over my younger brother’s left thigh, an inch below the hem of his SpongeBob boxers. As I screw the needle into the injection pen, Alex feeds me instructions. It’s my first time, but already it’s his 37th.


“Here are the rules: Insert the needle quickly and gently, but only when I say so,” he says, taking the pen to pantomime the motion. He removes the first of two protective caps and turns a knob on the pen—one, two, three, four, five clicks—and watches intensely as his dose is released into the barrel.

Finally, a scanner that keeps pace with the urban emergency room: The Statscan is a digital X-ray device that can produce a full-body image in 13 seconds. Compare that to conventional X-ray films, which take up to 45 minutes to develop and must be pieced together to make head-to-toe images.