On tonight's broadcast we continue the series called Wounds of War. We are following some of the troops we first saw treated in combat hospitals in Iraq earlier in the year as they undergo treatment in the United States.  I want to add a personal note here.  The opportunity to cover this story in the detail I've been allowed  has been, and I look forward to it continuing to be, one of the greatest privileges of my career.  The bravery and sense of duty of our troops as well as the dedication and compassion of the doctors, nurses and medics who care for them far exceeds anything I could have imagined before I witnessed it all personally.

Of course know there are problems. In today's dispatch of my regular column appearing on MSNBC'com's health page, I detail the twin curses of the enormous numbers of brain injuries and the lack of preparedness for the long-term care of all sorts of wounds that so many veterans will require.  The system is simply overwhelmed.  I also point out why former Senator Bob Dole, who is co-chair of the commission set up to address these problems, should have the motivation to make things right.  We'll be watching.  I look forward to following these soldier's and medic's  stories for the duration of  the war and long afterward

We have the very exciting news tonight about progress in the embryonic stem cell field. This work holds the chance of creating these amazing building blocks of life without destroying embryos.  It is important to note that hasn't happened yet.  This work is in mice only.  The step to humans could be easy or difficult, but the scientists won't know until they try it. 

One big stumbling block is that the method used to insert genes into mouse skin cells uses a type of virus that can make the cells cancerous.  There are other technical problems as well.  And it is important to note that despite all the hope about Parkinson's, diabetes and other diseases, nothing has been successfully treated yet with embryonic stem cells.  And many scientists say that the efforts to find out whether the cells work have been hampered by the federal governments restrictions on funding.   

Viewer's seeking more information can look at a press release from MIT's Whitehead Institute , a press release from UCLA, and one of the original research papers.  For one prospective on the ethics debate check out Arthur Caplan's analysis. Read the complete news report.

Watch Robert's report from the 'Nightly News' broadcast

Many of you have been seeking further information after our broadcast story Monday night on the implication of new research that suggests up to 100,000 breast cancer patients received drugs that did nothing to combat their cancer, but put them at risk for heart failure and leukemia.

Here is an analysis piece I have written for MSNBC.com that delves further into the subject.
Click to read

After touring the combat hospitals of Iraq with Robert Bazell, cameraman Craig White, and soundperson Susan Becerra, I don't think I'm speaking out of turn to say that none us have ever before seen the amount of severe trauma we witnessed in our two week trip. Since returning back, the lasting impression for me is the somewhat surprising roller coaster of emotions felt on a daily basis. I'm not talking about the simple up and down reactions to each day's event, but a rather more forceful pulling and tearing of emotions to levels of extreme highs and extreme lows.

Two images have been seared into my mind:

The first is a beautiful little Iraqi girl who was rushed into the Baghdad emergency room our first few days into the tour. Robert will feature her in his story on Wednesday. The victim of a mortar attack, she looked like a rag doll, carried into the hospital with a mangled leg hanging off. Her face was eerily devoid of any emotion at all.

The little girl appeared to have very little chance of surviving, and though the hospital sprang into action, a feeling of gloom descended upon almost everyone. We followed her to the operating room, and watched as doctors amputated her left leg.  Hours later it become clear that the girl was going to survive. More and more hospital workers turned up to check on her condition. Grim faces in the hallways began looking hopeful. Later, a feeling of collective giddiness took hold of the ward. A tiny life was being saved. It's difficult to describe the precise moment when feelings of despair and bleakness morph into something close to euphoria.

The following day I was called down from a rooftop camera position by Maj. William White, head nurse of the Baghdad ER.  Usually a Zen-like force of calm and stability, he appeared slightly frantic, and motioned for me to come quickly. He put some surgical gloves on me, told me not get any blood on myself, and asked me to give him a hand moving a badly wounded Iraqi civilian from his gurney to a bed nearby. The wounded man's leg resembled the twisted truck of an old tree. His head trauma was so severe (there's no delicate way of putting this) that a good deal of its contents had spilled out onto the gurney. We slowly moved the man together, watching him expire. 

The moment, as always, was interrupted by the sounds of helicopter rotors overhead. More wounded were coming in. White rushed back inside. The entire experience lasted no more than three minutes. Running back up those stairs, I wondered how White and others could deal with the sheer volume of these experiences. I felt a bit like a tourist. If a single three minute experience could take such hold of me, what does a year feel like here? White works 12 hours a day, six days a week, for 12 months straight. "When it doesn't affect you anymore, it's time to get out of the business," he says. How many dead, dying and severely wounded will he come across in that time and how much can the human mind handle?

The combat hospitals around Iraq deal with a constant stream of severely wounded soldiers, civilians, children. Not the drip, drip, drip of a faulty faucet, but the constant flow of a tap left firmly on. It can seem endless. All the while, these professionals push on. The people we spoke to all seemed to have their own defense mechanisms firmly in place, tailored coping strategies for emotional survival. However, the drastic ups and downs were clear for everyone to see from day-to-day, sometimes hour-to-hour. I can only speak from my limited window of experience, but at times it resembled some sort of a bipolar existence. Moments of deep despair (a mass casualty incident involving 20-year-old Americans or an innocent mangled child) could be followed almost immediately by feelings of exhilaration and hope (the saving of that same child's life, for instance).

As you watch "Wounds of War" this week, spare a thought for these doctors, nurses, medics and Medevac pilots who day in and day out deal with a seemingly endless flow of wounded, and the roller coaster of emotions that comes with it. It's a white-knuckled ride that few, including those who spend a mere few weeks there, can ever really appreciate.

Above photo by NBC's Craig White.

Editor's note: If you missed part I in our "Wounds of War" series, click here to watch. Correspondent Robert Bazell also wrote today about head wounds in Iraq, the No. 1 injury of the war. Click here to read that.

Whenever we discuss a story about Alzheimer's, a lot of people around the room ask whether their forgetfulness is the beginning of this horrible disease. This is especially true concerning our story tonight, which is about younger people with the disease, and features a man who was diagnosed at age 45.

There is no simple answer to the question, but the Alzheimer's Association does offer a guide to the warning signs. The association's report on the prevalence of the disease in younger people can be seen here. In fact, the association's general Web site is an enormously helpful resource as is the Web site of the National Institute on Aging.

Editor's note: We also have an extensive collection of Alzheimer's coverage on MSNBC.com, including a special look at "Maintaining your Memory" as you age.

Tonight we report on the discovery of what may be the biological basis for sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. Researchers at Children's Hospital in Boston have found that the brain receptors for serotonin are greatly reduced in children who die of SIDS. You can read an abstract of the research here.

This is nowhere near a cure. But someday it could become a means of identifying the children who are at high risk from dying and intervening to reduce the chances of death.  SIDS, which is as old as humanity, has a long, sad history of parents being blamed -- and at times even charged as murderers -- for the deaths of infants six months and under. 

Researchers say SIDS requires three conditions: a child six months or younger, an environmental factor such as a lack of oxygen from a bad infection or from a child sleeping face down, and a change in the brain. This research is a giant step because it identifies that brain abnormality and shows there is a biological basis for the condition. We'll tell you more on tonight's broadcast.

Tonight we report on an amazing movement of research -- not from animals to humans but the other way around. 

Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City had been working on a vaccine to lessen the chances of melanoma recurring after surgical removal. Down the street at the Animal Medical Center, veterinarians heard of the studies and asked if they could try it in dogs. It turns out dogs naturally get melanoma and it can be fatal to them just as it can be for humans. In many of the dogs the vaccine actually cured the cancer, and the vaccine is about to be licensed. But for now, all this work remains experimental.

We'll tell you all about it on tonight's broadcast.

In the meantime, you can find more information on the dog studies at the Animal Medical Center Web site. You can make an appointment at the Animal Medical Center by calling (212) 838-7053. For information on the human trials led by Dr. Jed Wolchok at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, call 1-800-525-2225 or visit their Web site.

Tonight we report on a potential advance in the treatment of lung cancer — a test to see who can benefit from chemotherapy immediately after surgery to remove early stage lung cancer. I say potential advance because this is about a test that is not yet on the market. It requires a large trial to prove its true worth, and that won't be finished for a few years. You can read an abstract of the actual research from the New England Journal of Medicine.

We chose to publicize this early finding because lung cancer is by far the leading cancer killer and treatment advances have lagged far behind other cancers. This is about to change. A screening test that finds cancer at its earliest stages has just completed a 10-year trial. Those results have not been published, but many experts widely expect they will show that former and current smokers can benefit from screening to find early, small cancers that can be removed easily with surgery. 

But even when a tiny tumor is removed there is still a big problem. In half of the patients the cancer will recur, threatening the patient's life. The new test, based an analysis of 2,100 genes, distinguished between the tumors that are cured by surgery alone and those that require preventative – so called adjuvant - chemotherapy. The scientists estimate the test has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives a year.

This is the latest discovery in what is called "personalized medicine" -– using tests to individualize therapy so that only those who need the treatment get it while others can be spared the cost and side effects.

As we will report tonight, a recent study of more than 10,000 adult survivors of childhood cancer found that three-quarters have a chronic health condition. And in more than 40 percent, the  conditions can be disabling or life threating.

It's a tough life as one woman we'll talk to can attest. But, as she quickly points out, it's better than the alternative.

You can learn more by viewing PDFs from the New England Journal of Medicine article: Study.pdf | Perspective.pdf

In tonight's "Making a Difference" segment we profile an amazing woman, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, a native of Tasmania, Australia, who is now a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Today she shared with two others the Lasker Award, America's premier recognition for biomedical science. Dr. Blackburn's research focuses on an enzyme called telomerase that helps determine how long cells live and whether or not they become cancerous. It is basic, but it has enormous potential to lead to new cancer drugs as well as diseases associated with aging and stress. You can read a lot more about her, the other winners and the science behind the discoveries on the Lasker Foundation's Web site.

I would especially recommend the introduction by Dr. Joseph Goldstein, the chairman of the jury and one of the most witty and erudite scientists I know.

You may have heard of Dr. Blackburn in a political context. In 2002 she was asked to join President Bush's Council on Bioethics set up to advise the White House on questions such as stem cell research.  In 2004 she was fired. She was never given a reason, but presumably she was canned because her scientific opinions did not conform to the administration expectations. She received thousands of e-mails and phone calls, almost all of them supportive of her efforts to try to stick with opinions  she thought were scientifically correct.

"It was a much bigger reaction nationwide then I had ever expected," she explained to me, "over something that in itself was not a big think. But it was the representation, I think, of something that had been much more consistently happening."

I close tonight's piece by saying  Dr. Blackburn might win the Nobel Prize on Monday when the award for Medicine for Physiology is announced. That is informed speculation. The Nobel committee in Sweden is notoriously secretive. I would bet a lot that Dr. Blackburn will win that prize, but it could take a few more years.

We are reporting on medical stories tonight and as always when possible we want to provide you the original sources so you can study them in detail if you wish.

The first is the discovery of two chemicals that appear in a pregnant woman's body months before the condition called preeclampsia, or toxemia, sets in. The condition is a major cause of premature births and the finding should soon give doctors a test so they can initiate treatment as early as possible. You can read the study here.

We also make reference to what is called the "Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer." This is a joint effort of the American Cancer Society and the federal government to show the trends in the incidence and death rates for all sorts of cancer. The big news this year is that the breast cancer rate, which has been increasing steadily, seems to have leveled off. There is an enormous amount of data in this report. You can read summaries and find links to the full report and related sites here.

Tonight, we report on the latest study of what has become one of the most complex choices many men face: what to do after a prostate cancer diagnosis. Because of the widespread use of the PSA blood test, 234,000 men in the U.S. will be diagnosed this year with prostate cancer. Huge numbers get surgery or radiation even though most leading doctors in the field think a lot of them can get by with either no treatment (so called "watchful waiting") or hormone therapy whose side effects, unlike surgery or radiation, are reversible. 

You can see a summary of the study we report on. 

For men and their loved ones facing the wrenching decisions involved with prostate cancer there are now a wealth of support groups. I think one of the best is Us Too.   

I would also point to the American Cancer Society's information section on the disease.

Prostate cancer is clearly an area where many men and their families, armed with the best information, have to make their own decisions.

Read Robert's complete report and find more helpful links here.