Katie Thomas

If he is confirmed by the Senate, Hahn would fill the vacancy left by Scott Gottlieb, who stepped down as commissioner in April. In doing so, he passed over the acting commissioner, Norman Sharpless, who had the support of previous commissioners and an array of patient groups.

The Department of Health and Human Services said Friday that Sharpless would be returning to his role as director of the National Cancer Institute, which he previously held before taking over as acting commissioner. Dr. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health, will fulfill the duties of acting commissioner while Hahn goes through the confirmation process.

Hahn, 59, is credited with returning MD Anderson — considered one of the nation’s best cancer centers — to stable footing after a series of financial and ethical controversies involving its previous president, Dr. Ronald DePinho, who resigned in 2017. Hahn is also a noted radiation oncologist and cancer researcher.

A Washington outsider without significant policy experience, Hahn would step into a high-intensity job that requires deft political skills and oversight of a sprawling federal agency that regulates everything from lifesaving cancer therapies to dog food.

He would take over as the agency is grappling with a number of urgent issues, including the opioid epidemic, contaminants in common drugs and an outbreak of mysterious lung illnesses caused by vaping.

“The FDA is, as always, at front and center,” said Dr. David Kessler, who served as the agency’s commissioner during the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He described the challenge of navigating competing interests as “white heat.”

Hahn would have time working against him, Kessler and others said, taking over just as Trump’s reelection campaign gets underway, with the possibility he would only have about a year to stay in the job. “It’s somewhat of a gamble,” Kessler said.

Dr. Robert Califf, who was FDA commissioner during the Obama administration and has supported Sharpless, said the learning curve at the agency is steep. “It takes six months to figure out where the bathrooms are,” he said. “The loss of continuity seems like a big negative.”

Some health interest groups said they were looking forward to working with Hahn. In a statement, the American Heart Association urged Hahn to address rising rates of teen nicotine addiction and to carry out a promised ban on flavored e-cigarettes that has not yet come to fruition.

“We welcome the nomination of a permanent FDA commissioner at a time when the agency’s role to protect and promote public health is only growing in importance,” the association’s chief executive, Nancy Brown, said in a statement.

Another group reacted with dismay to the news that Giroir would be assuming the commissioner’s duties until Hahn is confirmed, saying that Giroir had overseen cuts to the office that administers federal funding for family planning and reproductive health.

“We do not want to see the FDA entangled in the politics around reproductive health and women’s health,” Cynthia Pearson, executive director of the National Women’s Health Network, said in a statement.

Hahn specializes in lung cancer and sarcoma. He has moved up the ranks at MD Anderson since arriving in 2015, when he served as chairman of the radiation oncology department. In 2017, he was named the hospital’s chief operating officer and in 2018, the chief medical executive. Before coming to MD Anderson, he was chairman of the radiation oncology department at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine from 2005 to 2014.

Hahn has donated to Republicans in the past, though not to the Trump campaign. In 2017, he gave $1,000 to the New Pioneers PAC, a group affiliated with Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., who was then chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees the FDA. In earlier election cycles, he donated to candidates from both parties, including $706 to Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, in 2012 and $250 to the congressional campaign of Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat, in 2008.

Sharpless, by contrast, had donated to Democrats, including $500 to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2012 and $250 in 2008.

Hahn is seen as a skilled leader with a laid-back, friendly approach that has helped to speed his ascendancy at the institutions where he has worked. More recently, he was a finalist for chief medical officer at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, but the job was ultimately given to the person who had been serving in the acting role.

In 2017, Hahn stepped in to run MD Anderson after DePinho announced his resignation. At the time, the cancer center was operating at a financial loss, and a series of scandals involving DePinho — including his ties to for-profit companies — had taken a toll on morale, as did the layoffs of about 800 people.

“Steve was asked to right the ship, and he did,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, former chief medical and scientific officer at the American Cancer Society, who is now a professor of oncology and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University.

By the end of the year, MD Anderson had returned to financial stability.

“He has the ability to stand up, take responsibility, understand the problem and fix the problem so it won’t happen again, and help everybody through that,” said Dr. Theodore DeWeese, vice dean for clinical affairs at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Nevertheless, Hahn has weathered his own set of controversies. In 2009, he testified before a Congressional panel to explain why a doctor under his supervision had improperly implanted dozens of radiation seeds into patients at a veteran’s hospital in Philadelphia, sometimes into the wrong organs.

“In the radiation oncology world, it was a huge, huge deal and a real tragic thing for the patients,” said Dr. Eric Horwitz, chair of radiation oncology at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, who knew Hahn when he worked at the University of Pennsylvania. Although Hahn had assumed his role after the harmful treatments had begun, they continued under his watch. “Mistakes were made, he acknowledged them, and he didn’t blame other people,” Horwitz said.

This spring, several of his employees expressed anger over what they described as racially motivated dismissals of Chinese researchers as part of a federal investigation into whether foreign nationals were sharing research with their governments. Hahn defended the move to staff at a town hall in April, according to Science Magazine, and said the dismissals were not racially motivated.

And in June, the federal government cited MD Anderson for serious safety violations after a 23-year-old patient with leukemia died after receiving a contaminated blood transfusion. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services placed the hospital under heightened monitoring — a remarkable development given MD Anderson’s reputation. The cancer center is working with the agency to correct the issues that were identified, and Hahn had been overseeing the process.

This article originally appeared in

Trump to Pick Cancer Researcher to Head FDA

President Donald Trump said Friday that he intended to nominate Dr. Stephen Hahn, a top executive at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, to be the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

Hahn, 59, is credited with returning the MD Anderson Cancer Center — considered by many to be one of the nation’s best — to stable footing after a series of financial and ethical controversies involving its previous president, Dr. Ronald DePinho, who resigned in 2017. Hahn is also a noted radiation oncologist and cancer researcher.

Trump to Nominate Stephen Hahn, Cancer Researcher, to Head FDA

Trump’s selection of Hahn will fill the vacancy left by Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who stepped down as commissioner in April. In doing so, he passed over the acting commissioner, Dr. Norman Sharpless, who had the support of previous commissioners and an array of patient groups.

Hahn, 59, is credited with returning the cancer center — considered by many to be one of the nation’s best — to stable footing after a series of financial and ethical controversies involving its previous president, Dr. Ronald DePinho, who resigned in 2017. Hahn is also a noted radiation oncologist and cancer researcher.

If he is confirmed by the Senate, Hahn, a Washington outsider without significant policy experience, will step into a high-intensity job that requires deft political skills and oversight of a sprawling federal agency that regulates everything from lifesaving cancer therapies to dog food.

Stephen Hahn, a Noted Cancer Researcher, to Be Nominated to Head the FDA

President Donald Trump was expected Friday to nominate Dr. Stephen Hahn, a top executive at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, to be the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, according to a source familiar with the president’s decision.

The proposal would permit pilot programs developed by states, pharmacies or drug distributors that sought to safely import prescription medications from Canada. The Food and Drug Administration also planned to advise manufacturers on how they could import high-priced drugs like insulin that are sold more cheaply in other countries.

“President Trump has been clear: For too long American patients have been paying exorbitantly high prices for prescription drugs that are made available to other countries at lower prices,” Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, said in a statement released Wednesday.

The rising price of prescription drugs has been a popular topic at the Democratic presidential debates, and the timing of the administration’s announcement fell in the middle of the Tuesday-Wednesday schedule of this month’s debates for the Democratic candidates.

On Tuesday night, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has long supported the idea, said he traveled to Canada on Sunday with a group of consumers who were buying insulin at what they said was one-tenth the price they usually pay in the United States. Higher prices are being charged by “the crooks who run the pharmaceutical industry in America today,” Sanders said.

Many other countries negotiate lower prices because their health care systems are run by the government, giving them more leverage to bargain. In the United States, private insurers typically negotiate with drug companies on prices. The pharmaceutical industry argues that prices overseas are artificially low and that people in those countries often don’t get access to as many new drugs as Americans do.

The announcement signaled a major policy shift: Just a year ago, Azar described such importation programs as “gimmicks” and no other administration has allowed drug importation.

But the HHS plan has significant limitations and was short on details. The proposed rule would not apply to high-priced drugs like insulin or other biologic drugs like Humira because of exceptions included in earlier legislation. And the separate FDA guidance would permit importation of drugs, including insulin, only if the drugmakers agreed to take part in the plan.

“This is a plan to make a plan on importation,” said Rachel Sachs, a law professor and drug policy expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “This is not happening in the next week, in the next month or likely even in the next year because the administration will need to carry out the rule-making process.”

The proposal was welcomed as an initial step from lawmakers and groups like AARP. But it got a tepid response from Elizabeth Rowley, the founder and director of T1International, a diabetes advocacy group that organized a trip from the United States to Canada last month to help consumers buy insulin. She called the move a “Band-Aid.”

“This is kind of a distraction from the real issue, and the real problem,” Rowley said, “which is pharmaceutical companies are setting costs at exorbitant rates and patients are suffering and dying.”

Lobbyists for the drug industry swiftly denounced the proposal as well, repeating longtime arguments that allowing drugs to be imported from Canada could open the door to counterfeit products. “The administration’s importation scheme is far too dangerous for American patients,” the industry’s main trade group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said in a statement. “There is no way to guarantee the safety of drugs that come into the country from outside the United States’ gold-standard supply chain.”

Democrats and Republicans in Congress have been debating legislation that would allow importation of drugs to obtain cheaper prices, and other measures to try to rein in costs. But leading members of Congress have said that major proposals won’t be fully prepared before September.

The new policy is an about-face for Azar, who like other Republicans has been skeptical about importing drugs from other countries.

In May 2018, Azar called the idea a “gimmick” and said: “They are a lovely neighbor to the north, but they’re a small one. Canada simply doesn’t have enough drugs to sell them to us for less money, and drug companies won’t sell Canada or Europe more just to have them imported here.”

But over the past year, the tone has shifted as Republican state leaders have joined Democrats in talking about importing drugs from Canada. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, favors such a plan, and in May, Trump directed Azar to help make it happen. Vermont also has a law allowing importation. But the federal government has not yet cleared any states to do so, and an HHS official said Wednesday that the regulations would need to be finalized before any applications could be evaluated.

Trump has railed against the idea that many countries pay less for drugs than in the United States, calling it a form of “global freeloading” because many treatments sold overseas were developed by U.S. companies.

In July, Trump said he was planning an executive order, a “favored-nation clause,” which would allow the United States to pay whatever the lowest price is in other countries. But his comments were vague, and it was unclear whether he was referring to a more limited pilot program being proposed by his administration that would apply to only a small subset of drugs administered by doctors and in clinics. There were also questions about how far any executive order could go without congressional legislation.

Several of Trump’s other proposals to lower drug prices have faltered recently, including efforts to force drug companies to list their prices on TV ads.

The importation proposal leans heavily on portions of a 2003 law that allowed states, pharmacies and distributors to apply to the federal government to import drugs from Canada. But that law, which also set up Medicare’s Part D drug coverage program, contained many exceptions, including controlled substances, injectable drugs and complex treatments known as biologics, like insulin.

The idea had also been rejected by previous commissioners of the FDA who raised concerns about importing counterfeit products that might be unsafe.

Azar said that the Trump administration was taking a different view. “The door was closed. What we are saying today is, we are open,” Azar said in a call with reporters Wednesday. “Work with us, convince us that you have a game plan that can work.”

He said that large, multinational drug distributors could manage a complex importation system, and that new so-called “track-and-trace” technology for prescription drugs minimized the risk of introducing counterfeits into the system. “There are hurdles, of course,” Azar said. “But the hurdles now are known and they’re being laid out and they are surmountable.”

But the plan received an unenthusiastic response from the trade group for pharmaceutical distributors, whose largest members operate in the United States and Canada. The group, the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, said that importation plans would be costly — potentially negating their value — and that distributors’ work to improve the tracking of drugs as required by a 2013 law “would be jeopardized.”

The administration said that it would require applicants like states to show how they would comply with federal tracking requirements and that it was considering other ways to comply with the tracking law.

Canada does not have a government-mandated tracking system, and it was unclear how distributors and manufacturers could comply if drugs intended for sale in Canada were imported to the United States, said Adam Fein, who studies the drug supply chain as chief executive of the Drug Channels Institute. “It’s just like bizarre,” he said. “Reading this action plan, it reads as if it was written 15 years ago.”

Fein and others also said the second piece of the importation plan — creating guidelines for companies that want to import their own drugs from Canada — was likely to be limited. In many cases, drugmakers have little incentive to create competition with their own high-priced drugs in the United States.

And they already have another avenue — by creating something called an authorized generic — to sell a cheaper version of their product to consumers who are paying the full price for their drugs. In March, Eli Lilly began selling a half-price authorized generic of its Humalog insulin, in an effort to head off criticism over its high prices. Mylan did the same in 2016 with its EpiPen emergency allergy treatment.

Canadian officials have warned the U.S. government that importation programs could jeopardize their own supply of drugs, leading to potential shortages, according to a Reuters report. Others have said drug companies could limit their supplies to those countries or raise their prices in response to any new U.S. policy.

Amir Attaran, a law and medicine professor at the University of Ottawa, noted that Canada’s population is one-ninth that of the United States’. He compared a large-scale importation plan to “transfusing the blood of a mouse to an elephant. The mouse is not going to survive that.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/health/drug-imports-canada.html" id="44c7f071-29a9-35b1-af8a-3c0eea9a0f0d">The New York Times</a>.

Rules Would Allow Import of Some Cheaper Prescription Drugs, but With Limits

The Trump administration said Wednesday it was taking steps to make it easier to import less expensive prescription drugs from other countries, particularly Canada. The move has long been supported by progressives, but has encountered fierce opposition from the pharmaceutical industry.

Under the plan, the administration said it would propose a rule to permit pilot programs developed by states, pharmacies or drug distributors that sought to safely import prescription medications from Canada. The Food and Drug Administration also planned to advise manufacturers for how they could import high-priced drugs like insulin that are sold more cheaply in other countries.

Although the announcement signaled a major policy shift because Democratic and Republican administrations have generally opposed importing drugs from overseas, the proposal was also limited in nature. The proposed rule would not apply to high-priced drugs like insulin or biologic drugs like Humira, because of exceptions included in earlier legislation. And the FDA guidance would only permit importation of drugs, including insulin, if the drugmakers agreed to take part in the plan.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress have been debating legislation that would allow importation of drugs to obtain cheaper prices, and other measures to try to rein in costs. But leading members of Congress have said that major proposals will not be fully prepared before September.

The rising price of prescription drugs has been a popular topic at the Democratic presidential debates, and the timing of the administration’s announcement fell in the middle of the Tuesday-Wednesday schedule of the July debates for the Democratic candidates.

On Tuesday night, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has long supported the idea, said he traveled to Canada on Sunday with a group of consumers who were buying insulin at what they said was one-tenth the price they usually pay in the United States. Higher prices are being charged by “the crooks who run the pharmaceutical industry in America today,” Sanders said.

Many other countries are able to negotiate lower prices because their health care systems are run by the government, giving them more leverage. In the United States, private insurers typically negotiate with drug companies on prices. The drug industry has said that the prices overseas are artificially low and that people in those countries often do not get access to as many new drugs as Americans do.

The new policy is an about-face for Azar, who like other Republicans has been skeptical about importing drugs from other countries. The idea had also been rejected by previous commissioners of the FDA, including Margaret Hamburg, who raised concerns about importing counterfeit products.

In May 2018, Azar called the idea a “gimmick” and said, “They are a lovely neighbor to the north, but they’re a small one. Canada simply doesn’t have enough drugs to sell them to us for less money, and drug companies won’t sell Canada or Europe more just to have them imported here.”

But over the past year, the tone has shifted as Republican state leaders have joined Democrats in talking about importing drugs from Canada. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has said he wants to be able to do so, and in May, Trump directed Azar to help make it happen. Vermont also has a law allowing importation although it has not gotten federal approval.

Canadian officials have warned the U.S. government that importation programs could jeopardize their own supply of drugs, leading to potential shortages, according to a Reuters report in July. Others have said drug companies could limit their supplies to those countries or raise their prices in response to any new U.S. policy.

In July, Trump said he was planning an executive order, a “favored-nation clause,” which would allow the United States to pay whatever the lowest price is in other countries. But his comments were vague, and it was unclear whether he was referring to a more limited pilot program being proposed by his administration that would apply only to a small subset of drugs administered by doctors and in clinics. There were also questions about how far any executive order could go without congressional legislation.

Trump Administration Weighs Allowing Drug Imports for Cheaper Prescriptions

The Trump administration said Wednesday that it was taking steps to make it easier for less expensive prescription drugs to be imported from other countries, particularly Canada, a move that has long been supported by progressives but has encountered fierce opposition from the pharmaceutical industry.

The move is aimed at addressing rising anger over the cost of the lifesaving product, whose list price has skyrocketed in recent years. Express Scripts said about 700,000 people filed a claim for insulin last year through its Cigna or Express Scripts plans. The average monthly savings for those whose employers opted into the plan would be about $16 a month.

Insurers and drug manufacturers have been under pressure to show that they are doing something about the rising list price of drugs, in particular insulin, which many people with diabetes need to survive.

The average price of insulin, versions of which have been around since the 1920s, roughly doubled to about $450 a month in 2016 from around $234 a month in 2012, according to the Health Care Cost Institute. And the cost has risen even higher since 2016, putting people without insurance and those with high deductibles at risk of rationing their doses and, in some cases, going without treatment.

“For people with diabetes, insulin can be as essential as air,” said Dr. Steve Miller, executive vice president and chief clinical officer of Cigna, which merged last year with Express Scripts. “We need to ensure these individuals feel secure in their ability to afford every fill so they don’t miss one dose, which can be dangerous for their health.”

Multiple congressional inquiries have focused on insulin, and Tuesday, a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on insulin prices that featured testimony from patients and doctors. Executives from the top pharmacy benefit managers, including Express Scripts, are scheduled to testify before the Senate Finance Committee next week, when the price of insulin will also likely come up.

Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the finance panel’s chairman, and Ron Wyden, the panel’s ranking Democrat from Oregon, sent letters to Express Scripts and two other major drug benefit managers asking for more information about the role they play in rising insulin costs. “The essential question is whether the practices employed by PBMs actually reduce the cost of insulin for patients and achieve the lowest possible federal spending,” the senators said in their letter.

Under the new plan, employers who cover their workers through Cigna and Express Scripts can opt into the program. The extra costs will be picked up by the three drugmakers that sell insulin — Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi. Because the manufacturers are covering the costs, anti-kickback laws prohibit Medicare beneficiaries and other people insured through government health care programs from these types of negotiated arrangements.

Cigna and Express Scripts said the average out-of-pocket cost for consumers under their existing plans was $41.50 for a 30-day supply of insulin. (Another large pharmacy benefit manager, OptumRx, which is owned by UnitedHealthcare, cited similar costs.) The companies said that patients with a high deductible or coinsurance — where they must pay a percentage of a drug’s list price — would benefit the most.

But Elizabeth Rowley, founder and director of T1International, a diabetes advocacy group that does not accept drug-industry funding, said the new plan failed to address the underlying cause of the problem: high list prices.

“This is yet another P.R. move — a stopgap at best — to release the pressure on those responsible for the insulin price crisis,” she said in an email Tuesday. “Those patients who are lucky enough to be on a ‘participating plan’ can benefit, but what about those who aren’t? This program gives no lifetime ‘assurance’ that people with Type 1 diabetes can rely on.”

About 7.4 million people in the United States use at least one form of insulin, according to the American Diabetes Association. Insulin has come under particular scrutiny not just because of its lifesaving nature but also because of the growing gap between the list price — what someone without insurance would pay at a pharmacy — and the net price, or what insurers and employers pay when someone with diabetes is prescribed insulin through their plan. As a result, patients who are uninsured or who have less-generous insurance coverage have had to pay higher prices.

In March, Eli Lilly said it would begin selling a cheaper version of its most popular insulin, Humalog, for $137.35, a 50 percent discount off the list price.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/health/drug-prices-insulin-express-scripts.html" id="ec4ff79b-c6be-3ccf-a163-8217d95ae8c5">The New York Times</a>.

Express Scripts Offers Diabetes Patients a $25 Cap for Monthly Insulin

Consumers whose drug benefits are managed by Express Scripts could see their out-of-pocket costs for insulin limited to $25 a month under a plan announced Wednesday.

“For people with diabetes, insulin can be as essential as air,” said Dr. Steve Miller, executive vice president and chief clinical officer of Cigna, which merged last year with Express Scripts.

Under the new plan, employers who cover their workers through Cigna and Express Scripts can opt into the program. The extra costs will be picked up by the three drugmakers that sell insulin — Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi.

Cigna and Express Scripts said the average out-of-pocket cost for consumers under their existing plans was $41.50 for a 30-day supply of insulin.

But Elizabeth Rowley, founder and director of T1International, a diabetes advocacy group, said the new plan failed to address the underlying cause of the problem: high list prices.

“How are we going to survive?” one mother asked on a text thread Tuesday night. My phone pinged at 9 a.m. Wednesday with a plaintive message from someone else: “We’ve already gone through my two craft projects, painted and watched an hour of TV.”

At times like these, modern parents turn to Google and YouTube and Pinterest, which beckon with seemingly simple and fun science experiments for frigid temperatures.

But as my 7-year-old son, Gus, and his friend Eren, 8, learned on Wednesday when we tested a handful of popular cold-weather experiments, science doesn’t always follow the neat path of a viral video.

1. Instant slushies

Several videos demonstrate how to super-chill soda. A similar experiment instantly freezes water.

We shook up two one-liter bottles of Sprite and placed them outside of our front door, where my phone told me it was minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit. We also put a small bottle of spring water alongside them to test the instant-ice trick.

The idea was to try to cool the soda and the water below their freezing point without turning them solid. Without the impurities found in tap water, there is nothing to start the nucleation process that causes water to freeze, delivering a supercooled liquid that, once jostled or disturbed, will instantly turn to a slushy ice.

But two hours later, the bottles outside our house were already halfway solid. Eren, Gus and my 3-year-old daughter, Hildy, didn’t seem to care as they slurped down cups of the stuff.

“What did we learn today?” my husband, Alex, said. “The internet is broken.”

Olivia Castellini, a senior exhibit developer at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, offered several other possible explanations. Our spring water might not have been pure enough, and we may have waited too long. Next time, she recommended timing how long it took to freeze one bottle, then putting out another bottle and returning about 15 minutes earlier to catch the liquid at exactly the moment. “You have to find just the right amount of time to super cool it,” Castellini said.

2. The balloon trick

This experiment is designed to show how the volume of a gas expands as it warms, and contracts as it cools. The method: Blow up balloons in warm air, then expose them to cold air and they will deflate. They will reinflate when you return them to warm air.

This is the same reason car tires deflate in cold weather, said Michael Kennedy, a research professor and director of Northwestern University’s Science in Society, a science education center.

We inflated half a dozen balloons inside, then bundled up and went outside to wait for them to shrink in the minus 39 degree windchill. And we waited. Gus and Eren decided to bury their balloons in a snow bank. Hildy’s flew into the street.

When we could no longer feel our noses, we put the remaining balloons in a bag, tied it to the door handle, and rushed inside. After about 45 minutes, the balloons had deflated only slightly and we realized we hadn’t been very scientific: It might have been wise to first measure the balloons’ original circumference, for example.

Once back inside, the balloons did return to their previous shape, but by this time only the adults cared. The child scientists wanted more Sprite slushies.

Castellini recommended tying a string around the balloons, placing them outside, in a window, where you can watch them from the comfort of your home. When the string falls off, they’ve shrunk.

3. Freezing bubbles

Of all the cold-weather experiments, the one I was most looking forward to was the frozen-bubble trick. The online videos are magical, demonstrating how a normally ethereal soap bubble hardens into a lacy globe when the temperature is just right.

We tried two versions of bubble wands — a more traditional wand with a small, round opening, and a large, oblong variety designed for bigger bubbles.

Once outside, both wands created perfect bubbles, but it was hard to get a look at them because the wind whipped them down the street. Still, it was fun to watch them pop as they flew out of the wands, leaving frozen skins that dropped to the ground. If we waited too long, the bubble solution froze in the wand, creating a translucent pane that we could poke with our fingers.

Bubbles, Castellini said, are really a “water and soap sandwich,” with soap encasing a layer of water. In warmer weather, the air inside the bubble expands as it warms, popping the bubble before it gets far. But in cold weather, the water sandwiched inside the soap has a chance to freeze before the bubble pops.

Kennedy suggested experimenting with different solutions to create the longest-lasting bubbles. Many people add glycerin, which gives the bubble strength, he said.

4. Boiling water cloud

This trick resurfaces during nearly every cold snap, along with the inevitable safety warnings (to riff off Jim Croce, don’t throw it into the wind).

“The cool thing about water is that it can exist in liquid, solid and gas states all at the same time,” Castellini said. By throwing boiling water into frigid air, she said, “you’re manipulating that transition.” Because cold air can’t absorb water the way warm air can, the water that is thrown has to go somewhere — so it freezes in tiny droplets and falls to the ground in a dramatic cloud.

The experiment works best with extremely cold air, and we certainly had that on Wednesday. We repeated the experiment four times — throwing about a half of a cup of boiling water out of a steel travel mug — and each time, the water dissipated in a billowing puff of ice crystals.

5. Maple syrup taffy

Given the demand for Sprite slushies, I had saved our other sugar-laden experiment for last.

Several websites describe a simple recipe for maple syrup taffy. Pack snow into a pan and place it in the freezer. Heat maple syrup to about 240 degrees Fahrenheit, checking with a candy thermometer. Pour the syrup over the snow, where it will harden into a chewy taffy.

Our syrup boiled over when it reached about 220 degrees, preventing us from heating it to the right temperature. By now, the children had ripped their blankets from their beds, fashioned them into capes, and were begging for iPad time. I poured the syrup over the snow, and the hot liquid turned everything into a slushy mess. No taffy in sight.

Use a larger pot next time, our science consultants suggested, and cook the syrup more slowly.

There’s still time to try again, I suppose. The high on Thursday is expected to be just slightly warmer, at minus 1 degree, and school is still canceled.

Not all experiments turn out as planned.

“But that’s really the fun of science, is that you didn’t get the results you expect,” Kennedy said. “You start asking questions about why didn’t I get what I thought?”

“At the heart of science are questions,” he said, “not facts.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/science/polar-vortex-experiments.html" id="9bc3f0d1-7a73-37f6-a8c2-dd3563354c36">The New York Times</a>.

We Tried Five Polar-Weather Experiments. Here's What Happened.

EVANSTON, Ill. — It was minus 15 degrees here on Wednesday afternoon, near the epicenter of the polar vortex, and school had been canceled for much of the week.

His death was confirmed by MD Anderson, which said the cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.

Mendelsohn was the cancer center’s third president, serving from 1996 to 2011, a period in which MD Anderson rose in prominence to be considered the nation’s top cancer hospital. At the same time, its annual revenues quadrupled, to $3.1 billion.

“He was an extraordinary scientist, he was a compassionate individual, he was a strategic thinker, and he was able to bring all of those capabilities to bear as an exceptional leader of MD Anderson,” Dr. Peter Pisters, the center’s president, said in a telephone interview.

Mendelsohn began his career as a researcher. He made his name in the 1980s at the University of California, San Diego, where he developed cetuximab, the first targeted cancer therapy, which blocks receptors on cancer cells to halt their growth. The drug was approved by the federal government in 2004 and is sold by Eli Lilly as Erbitux, for the treatment of colorectal, head and neck cancers.

Erbitux and other targeted therapies were seen as breakthroughs for cancer patients because, unlike older chemotherapy drugs, which typically kill all rapidly dividing cells, targeted treatments go after the proteins that help cancer cells grow and survive.

John Mendelsohn was born in Cincinnati on Aug. 31, 1936, the son of Joe and Sarah (Feibel) Mendelsohn. After graduating from Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, he studied at Harvard, earning his undergraduate degree in biochemical sciences in 1958.

He married Anne Charles, a research chemist at Polaroid, in 1962.

After a year in Scotland as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Glasgow, Mendelsohn attended Harvard Medical School, earning his degree in 1963. Residency training at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston followed, as did fellowships at the National Institutes of Health and at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

In 1970, Mendelsohn joined the UC San Diego School of Medicine, where, in addition to helping to develop Erbitux, he became the founding director of the institution’s cancer center.

He left San Diego in 1985 to become chairman of the department of medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and spent more than a decade there until he took the job as president of MD Anderson in 1996.

Pisters said that when Mendelsohn arrived in Houston, MD Anderson did not have the physical size or reputation it has today. But, he added, “It did have what he could see as remarkable potential.”

Mendelsohn’s career was not without controversy. In 2002, he was criticized as having failed to identify problems as a board member at two troubled companies, energy giant Enron and biotech company ImClone Systems.

In the case of Enron, Mendelsohn served on the board’s audit committee despite having little financial experience; the company, which filed for bankruptcy in 2001, was later found to have used a series of questionable accounting practices to make it seem more profitable than it was.

The ImClone scandal involved allegations of insider trading after the company’s stock plummeted in the wake of news in late 2001 that its lead drug, Erbitux, the drug Mendelsohn had developed, had not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The company’s founder, Samuel D. Waksal, was arrested on charges of insider trading after prosecutors said he told friends and family to sell their stock. (Lifestyle maven Martha Stewart was famously ensnared in that scandal.)

Mendelsohn was not accused of wrongdoing in either case. But he came under scrutiny at ImClone in particular because he held dual roles as a member of the company’s board and as a paid scientific consultant. Lilly acquired ImClone in 2008.

Mendelsohn’s role in the development of Erbitux also came into question in 2002, after The Washington Post reported that patients in a clinical trial of Erbitux at MD Anderson had not been informed that, as head of the cancer center, Mendelsohn held a financial stake in the drug’s success. The hospital changed its policies to ensure that patients were told of such conflicts.

Mendelsohn survived the scandals, bolstered in part by the support of powerful Houston figures like former President George H.W. Bush, who was an enthusiastic backer of MD Anderson.

Indeed, Mendelsohn’s ability to befriend all types of people, from patients and fellow researchers to the leaders of Houston society, helped elevate MD Anderson’s profile. His wife, Anne C. Mendelsohn — who became an educator and a producer of science documentary films — was a key partner, joining him in his social and philanthropic work.

“They raised billions of dollars together,” said Jeffrey Mendelsohn, the middle of the Mendelsohns’ three sons. “As their lives evolved and my father got more and more prominent positions, she dedicated more and more of her life to working with him.”

During John Mendelsohn’s last five years as president, MD Anderson was recognized as the top cancer center in the country by U.S. News &amp; World Report, surpassing Memorial Sloan Kettering.

In a telephone interview, Mendelsohn’s sons — the two others are Andrew and Eric — credited his success to a ravenous curiosity that did not stop at the boundaries of science or medicine. He was an enthusiastic traveler, they said, and loved good meals, opera and all kinds of books.

Andrew Mendelsohn, his eldest son, recalled that when he went to college, his father would quiz him on the courses he was taking. The next time he returned home, “there would be six books on the subject, full of underlines,” he said.

“He was always trying to distill the essence of a book or a person or a moment,” he added.

Besides his wife and sons, John Mendelsohn is survived by eight grandchildren.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/obituaries/john-mendelsohn-dead.html" id="632eda8d-a2d8-344e-a2d8-d925b3f36d27">The New York Times</a>.

Dr. John Mendelsohn, 82, Researcher Who Led Top Cancer Center, Dies

Dr. John Mendelsohn, who led the prestigious University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center through an era of substantial growth, and who, as a scientist, helped pioneer a new type of cancer therapy, died Jan. 7 at his home in Houston. He was 82.

The committee voted 8-8, leaving it up to the agency to decide by the end of March whether the drug, sotagliflozin, should reach the market.

The drug, which is used along with insulin, is being developed by drugmakers Sanofi and Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, who plan to sell it under the brand name Zynquista. It carries a higher risk for developing diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening complication that happens when the body doesn’t get enough insulin, which led some of the reviewers to vote against it.

The companies said they would continue work with the FDA throughout the review process.

The drug is a once-daily pill designed to help people manage their blood sugar levels. In Type 1 diabetes — also known as juvenile diabetes because it is often diagnosed in childhood — the body does not produce insulin, so people with the disease must monitor their blood sugar and take insulin. But relying on external insulin can lead the body’s blood sugar levels to rise and fall, which is uncomfortable and can lead to health problems.

Like some other recently approved drugs for people with Type 2 diabetes — including Invokana and Jardiance — this one causes the body to excrete more blood sugar into the urine.

The drug’s approval would be based on the results of three clinical trials involving about 3,000 people. The trials found that the drug helped patients manage their blood sugar levels and brought other benefits, such as lower blood pressure and some weight loss.

But among patients who were given the drug, there were 56 cases of diabetic ketoacidosis in 1,748 patients, or 3.2 percent. In patients who took the placebo, by contrast, there were 5 cases out of 1,229 patients, or 0.4 percent.

Diabetic ketoacidosis, which is always a risk for people with Type 1 diabetes, can result in serious hospitalization or death. Several panel members said they worried the risk could be even higher in the real world, outside the confines of a clinical trial.

“I didn’t think it was ready for prime time,” said Dr. Jack A. Yanovski, of the National Institutes of Health, who voted against it. “The degree of benefit is small enough that it’s not clear that it could overwhelm the increased risk for very serious complications.”

But others said patients with Type 1 diabetes needed new treatments. Several patients who had received the drug in the clinical trial testified at the meeting, saying it had improved their quality of life. “It’s a step in the right direction,” said Susan Lellock, the panel’s patient representative, who voted in favor of approval. “With guidance, they need this. They need it desperately.”

Several panel members, including those who voted both for and against its approval, said the FDA should require the drugmakers to sell the drug under a strict plan for how patients should be monitored and educated about the risks of taking the drug.

Although the vast majority of Americans with diabetes have Type 2 diabetes, about 1.25 million people in the United States have Type 1, and an estimated 40,000 people each year will be diagnosed with it, according to the American Diabetes Association.

Diabetes drugs have come under a different kind of scrutiny because of the price of insulin, which has skyrocketed in recent years and led some patients to cut back on using it. Becky Lauer, a spokeswoman for Sanofi, declined to comment on the potential price of Zynquista if it is approved.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/health/fda-diabetes-drug-sanofi.html" id="42744971-e6e1-3d5a-a1e7-49f9d89bec3b">The New York Times</a>.

An advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration split evenly Thursday over whether the agency should approve the first oral medication to treat Type 1 diabetes.

FDA Panel Splits on Whether to Approve New Diabetes Drug

<h1>An advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration split evenly Thursday over whether the agency should approve the first oral medication to treat Type 1 diabetes.</h1>

Diabetes drugs have come under a different kind of scrutiny because of the price of insulin, which has skyrocketed in recent years and led some patients to cut back on using it. Sanofi declined to comment on the potential price of Zynquista if it is approved.

This article originally appeared in <a id="6894381c-9b4e-4bb7-85bb-5f8591da9095" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/health/fda-diabetes-drug-sanofi.html">The New York Times</a>.

FDA panel splits on whether to approve new diabetes drug

Katie Thomas

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FDA Panel Splits on Whether to Approve New Diabetes Drug

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