http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/opinion/17buffett.html

In an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times this week, Buffett reminded those Americans who have short memories how close our country came to “an economic meltdown” two years ago, in September 2008. The headine, “Pretty Good for Government Work,” makes Buffett’s opinion pretty obvious.

Buffett reminds us that two years ago Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in conservatorship; one Wall Street investment house was about to crumble and the other three were close to following; and the insurer AIG “was at death’s door.”

Corporate America wasn’t the only thing at risk, according to Buffett. Some 300 million Americans were about to see their jobs, 401(K)s and money-maret funds ”turn into pumpkins and mice…a destructive economic force unlike any seen for generations had been unleasehed.” he wrote.

As Buffett saw it, the government was the only “counterforce” in a position to stop the onset of a modern day Great Depression. 

“Well, Uncle Sam, you delivered,” Buffett wrote. “People will second-guess your specific decisions; you can always count on that. But…overall, your actions were remarkably effective.”

Buffett gives credit to Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Sheila Bair and even, albeit reluctantly, President Bush, for acting “with courage and dispatch.”

Otherwise, “the world would look far different now if you had not,” Buffett wrote, signing his piece “your grateful nephew.”   

Of course, the economy is not fixed. Unemployment is at 10 percent. Retail sales are just started to rebound. But we’re at a hell of a better place than we were. Apocalypse avoided.    

The New York Times did a Page One story Saturday on the Food and Drug Administration’s investigation of Columbia’s Kreitchman PET Center, which is on West 168th Street in Manhattan. This center over the years has received millions of dollars from the federal government and drug companies to conduct research on the effects of drugs and brain disorders.   

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/health/17columbia.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=FDA%20and%20Columbia%20University%20&st=cse

The center, according to The Times, is regarded as the leader in the use of positron emission tomography, or PET, for psychiatric research. 

 In a nutshell, the FDA found that the radiotracers used in PET, which the center has been producing for its own use, had impurity levels above and beyond what the agency permits.   

During exams radiotracers are injected into patients. The radiotracers build up in the parts of the body that are being studied — in the brain for psychiatric research – and release low-level radiation that researchers can detect. 

The FDA has standards for the radiation levels the purity and purity levels of radiotracers, but the ones that Columbia’s center was injecting into patients didn’t meet those standards.

And the purity levels of radiotracers are particularly important and sensitive in psychiatric research, because the drug can remain active in the brain and change a patient’s moods and behavior. That’s a particularly risky proposition when you’re dealing with people with depression and mental illness.

 The FDA has conducted several investigations of the Kreitchman Center, and repeatedly found that the facility was in violation of federal guidelines over a four-year span, according to The Times. In its most recent probe, which was in January, the FDA cited the center for six types of violations.

 In that investigation, the FDA said that since 2007 at least 10 batches of drugs with high levels of impurities that permitted had been injected into human subjects, The Times said. And in at least four cases, the impurity levels were twice what are permitted.

In the face of  those citations regarding its PET center, Columbia halted research as the facility.

Why would a respected research center inject their subjects with impure drugs? Ex-workers at the center explained that the lab “was under such pressure to produce studies that it papered over and hid impurities in drugs to stretch its resources and went ahead with business as usual despite FDA warnings,” The Times reported.

Columbia conducted its own  audit of its PET center, and decided that the FDA charges had enough substance to warrant an internal investigation. And the university added that so far, it hasn’t found any evidende that patients were harmed.