(AFP, 2/23/08)

VOTING OPENS FOR WORLD’S ODDEST BOOK TITLE  2008.

LONDON — Briish industry magazine, The Bookseller has announced this eyar’s shortlist for the oddest book title of the year, with a typical mix of the quirky and eclectic.  Visitors to the magazine’s website, www.thebookseller.com can make their choice from six mostly non-fiction titles unearthed by publishers, bookstore workers, and librarians from around the world.  The winner will be anounced on March 28.

     The nominees for The Diagram Prize are:

  • “I was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen” by Jasper McCutcheon.
  • “How to Write a How to Write Book” by Brian Paddock.
  • “Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues” by Catharine A. MacKinnon.
  • “Cheese Problems Solved” by P. L. H. McSweeney.
  • “If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs” by Big Boom.
  • “People Who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Doctor Feelgood” by Dee Gordon.

     Horace Bent, The Bookseller’s diarist, said on the magazine’s website: “I confess I have been anxious that as publishing becomes ever more corporate, the trade’s quirky charm is being squeezed out.  Listsa are pruned, targets are set, authors are culled.  But happily my fears have been proven unfunded: oddity lives on.”

     Last year’s winner was “The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Identification” by Julian Montague.

     The Diagram Prize has been running since 1978, when the winner was “Proceedings of The Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.”

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(Reuters, 2/24/08)

CHINA GENE EXPERTS SEARCH FOR ANSWERS ON DIABETES.

SHENZHEN, China — Chinese scientists are trying to find out which arrant genes are responsible for diabetes and certain forms of cancer that have long plagued China’s populations, a geneticist said.

     Rising affluene, richer diets and a sedentary lifestyle have tled to an alarming rise in cases of diabetes in China in recent dcades, while cancers of the esophagus, lungs, breast, stomach, and color have plagued Chinese people for a much longer time.

     The partly stat-funded Beijing Geonomics Institute (BGI), which completed the mapping out of the first Chinese human genome in 2007, is trying to figure out which genes may be responsible for these chronic and even terminal illnesses…

     Chinese doctors now rely on western data when making diagnoses and deciding protocols which Gao said was far from ideal.

     “When deciding how to administer drugs to a Chinese breast cancer patient, for example, it is important to consider her genetic makeup.  From diagnosis to drug dosage, it may be a different story,” said Gao.  “With our own data, we can have personalized medicine.  Even it it’s the same disease, you may need a different drug or dosage if ou have a different gentic makeup.”