Questcor Finds Profit for Acthar Drug, at $28,000 a Vial

Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

Christina Culver with her son Tyler, 6, at home in Colorado Springs this month. In 2007, Tyler was hospitalized when the price of Acthar soared.

THE doctor was dumbfounded: a drug that used to cost $50 was now selling for $28,000 for a 5-milliliter vial.

The physician, Dr. Ladislas Lazaro IV, remembered occasionally prescribing this anti-inflammatory, named H.P. Acthar Gel, for gout back in the early 1990s. Then the drug seemed to fade from view. Dr. Lazaro had all but forgotten about it, until a sales representative from a company called Questcor Pharmaceuticals appeared at his office and suggested that he try it for various rheumatologic conditions.

"I've never seen anything like this," Dr. Lazaro, a rheumatologist in Lafayette, La., says of the price increase.

How the price of this drug rose so far, so fast is a story for these troubled times in American health care — a tale of aggressive marketing, questionable medicine and, not least, out-of-control costs. At the center of it is Questcor, which turned the once-obscure Acthar into a hugely profitable wonder drug and itself into one of Wall Street's highest fliers.

At least until recently, that is. Now some doctors, insurance companies and investors are beginning to have doubts about whether the drug is really any better than much cheaper alternatives. Short-sellers have written scathing criticisms of the company, questioning its marketing tactics and predicting that its shareholders are highly vulnerable.

 That Acthar is even a potential blockbuster is a remarkable turn of events, considering that the drug was developed in the 1950s by a division of Armour & Company, the meatpacking company that once ruled the Union Stock Yards of Chicago. As in the 1950s, Acthar is still extracted from the pituitary glands of slaughtered pigs — essentially a byproduct of the meatpacking industry.

The most important use of Acthar has been to treat infantile spasms, also known as West syndrome, a rare, sometimes fatal epileptic disorder that generally strikes before the age of 1.

For several years, Questcor, which is based in Anaheim, lost money on Acthar because the drug's market was so small. In 2007, it raised the price overnight, to more than $23,000 a vial, from $1,650, bringing the cost of a typical course of treatment for infantile spasms to above $100,000. It said it needed the high price to keep the drug on the market.

"We have this drug at a very high price right now because, really, our principal market is infantile spasms," Don M. Bailey, Questcor's chief executive, told analysts in 2009. "And we only have about 800 patients a year. It's a very, very small — tiny — market."

Companies often charge stratospheric prices for drugs for rare diseases — known as orphan drugs — and Acthar's price is not as high as some. Society generally tolerates those costs to encourage drug companies to develop crucial, possibly lifesaving drugs for these often neglected diseases.

But Questcor did almost no research or development to bring Acthar to market, merely buying the rights to the drug from its previous owner for $100,000 in 2001. And while the manufacturing of Acthar is complex, it accounts for only about 1 cent of every dollar that Questcor charges for the drug.

Moreover, the tiny "orphan" market soon became much bigger. Before long, Questcor began marketing the drug for multiple sclerosis, nephrotic syndrome and rheumatologic conditions, even though there is little evidence that Acthar is more effective for those other conditions than alternatives that are far cheaper. And the company did so without being required to prove that the drug actually works. That is because Acthar was approved for use in 1952, before the Food and Drug Administration required clinical trials to show a drug is effective for a particular disease. Acthar is essentially grandfathered in.

Today, only about 10 percent of the drug's sales are for infantile spasms. The new uses, Mr. Bailey has told analysts, represent multibillion-dollar opportunities for Acthar and Questcor, its sole maker.

The results have been beyond even the company's wildest dreams. Sales of Acthar, which accounts for essentially all of Questcor's sales, totaled nearly $350 million in the first nine months this year, up 145 percent from the period a year earlier. In the same period, Questcor's earnings per share nearly tripled, to $2.12. In the five years after the big Acthar price increase in August 2007, Questcor shares rose from around 60 cents to about $50, in one of the best performances of any stock in any industry.

But in September, the shares plummeted after Aetna, the big insurer, said it would no longer pay for Acthar, except to treat infantile spasms, because of lack of evidence the drug worked for other diseases. The stock now trades at $26.93.

Peter Wickersham, senior vice president for cost of care at Prime Therapeutics, a pharmacy benefits manager that has found the drug is possibly being overused, says the huge increase in Acthar's price for patients "just invites the type of scrutiny that it's received."

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F.D.A. Approves Eliquis From Bristol and Pfizer

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved Eliquis, an anticlotting drug that has been highly anticipated by cardiologists and is expected to be a blockbuster for Bristol-Myers Squibb, which will make the drug, and Pfizer, which will help market it.

The agency approved Eliquis for reducing the risk of stroke and dangerous blood clots in people with atrial fibrillation, a common heart arrhythmia that afflicts millions of people in the United States.

The drug, also known as apixaban, is the third anticlotting medicine to be approved in recent years and the companies are expected to aggressively compete to pitch their products as a replacement for warfarin, an older treatment that requires more careful monitoring. Warfarin is also known by the brand name Coumadin.

"The marketing games will now begin," said Dr. Sanjay Kaul, a cardiologist at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the development of any of the drugs.

He said that cardiologists would now have to sort out the differences among Eliquis and its competitors already on the market: Pradaxa, sold by Boehringer Ingelheim, and Xarelto, sold by Johnson & Johnson and Bayer.

While some experts have argued that Eliquis offers the best balance between the drug's benefits and risks, Dr. Kaul said since there have been no clinical trials comparing the three new drugs, "it is impossible to adjudicate which of these new agents is the preferred one."

Bristol-Myers and Pfizer issued a brief statement Friday saying they were pleased with the approval. In a news release in November announcing the drug's approval in Europe, Bristol-Myers noted that Eliquis was the only drug in the group that has shown an advantage over warfarin in reducing the risk of stroke and dangerous blood clots, major bleeding and death.

The agency also warned that patients with prosthetic heart valves should not take Eliquis, nor should patients with atrial fibrillation that is caused by a heart valve problem.

Despite the promise of Eliquis and the other new drugs, some cautioned against prescribing them too enthusiastically.

Dr. Garret FitzGerald, a cardiologist and chairman of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania, said the trial results for Eliquis were impressive. But he added in an e-mail on Friday: "What matters to a patient is the individual effect in them."

He noted that patients taking Eliquis also suffered major bleeding episodes and said all drugs that prevent clotting carried a risk of bleeding. "Thus the F.D.A.'s warning to be on the lookout for bleeding seems just as appropriate as approval of Eliquis," he said.

Dr. Kaul says he tends to wait to prescribe new drugs until he learns more from the experience of colleagues, and Eliquis will be no exception. "I'm going to sit back by the sidelines and see how it pans out," he said, adding that he had begun to prescribe Pradaxa and Xarelto to patients.

Eliquis's entry into the United States market has been eagerly anticipated by Bristol-Myers and Pfizer after a succession of delays this year. Bristol-Myers, in particular, has been struggling since its best-selling blood-thinner drug, Plavix, lost its patent protection in May. Sales of Plavix, which Bristol-Myers sells in partnership with Sanofi, fell 96 percent in the third quarter of this year after cheaper generic alternatives flooded the market and the company has struggled to replace the lost sales.

Eliquis is "very important for Bristol because it's one of the legs of their investment case, that they can leapfrog over the Plavix expiration," said Les Funtleyder, the fund manager of Poliwogg, a private equity and hedge fund. He said he expected Eliquis to eventually earn more than $1 billion for its sellers.

In such a crowded field of competitors, Mr. Funtleyder said, consumers and doctors should brace themselves for a marketing onslaught. "I wonder if we'll see our first Eliquis commercial before the new year," he said.

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Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Revolutionary in the Study of the Brain, Dies at 103

Fabio Campana/European Pressphoto Agency

Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini in 2007. She discovered chemical tools the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerve networks.

Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning neurologist who discovered critical chemical tools that the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerve networks, opening the way for the study of how those processes can go wrong in diseases like dementia and cancer, died on Sunday at her home in Rome. She was 103.

Her death was announced by Mayor Gianni Alemanno of Rome.

"I don't use these words easily, but her work revolutionized the study of neural development, from how we think about it to how we intervene," said Dr. Gerald D. Fishbach, a neuroscientist and professor emeritus at Columbia.

Scientists had virtually no idea how embryo cells built a latticework of intricate connections to other cells when Dr. Levi-Montalcini began studying chicken embryos in the bedroom of her house in Turin, Italy, during World War II. After years of obsessive study, much of it at Washington University in St. Louis with Dr. Viktor Hamburger, she found a protein that, when released by cells, attracted nerve growth from nearby developing cells.

In the early 1950s, she and Dr. Stanley Cohen, a biochemist also at Washington University, isolated and described the chemical, known as nerve growth factor — and in the process altered the study of cell growth and development. Scientists soon realized that the protein gave them a new way to study and understand disorders of neural growth, like cancer, or of degeneration, like Alzheimer's disease, and to potentially develop therapies.

In the years after the discovery, Dr. Levi-Montalcini, Dr. Cohen and others described a large family of such growth-promoting agents, each of which worked to regulate the growth of specific cells. One, called epidermal growth factor and discovered by Dr. Cohen, plays a central role in breast cancer; in part by studying its behavior, scientists developed drugs to combat the abnormal growth.

In 1986, Dr. Levi-Montalcini and Dr. Cohen shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work.

Dr. Cohen, now an emeritus professor at Vanderbilt University, said Dr. Levi-Montalcini possessed a rare combination of intuition and passion, as well as biological knowledge. "She had this feeling for what was happening biologically," he said. "She was an intuitive observer, and she saw that something was making these nerve connections grow and was determined to find out what it was."

One of four children, Rita Levi-Montalcini was born in Turin on April 22, 1909, to Adamo Levi, an engineer, and Adele Montalcini, a painter, both Italian Jews who traced their roots to the Roman Empire. In keeping with the Victorian customs of the time, Mr. Levi discouraged his three daughters from entering college, fearing that it would interfere with their lives as wives and mothers.

It was not a future that Rita wanted. She had decided to become a doctor and told her father so. "He listened, looking at me with that serious and penetrating gaze of his that caused me such trepidation," she wrote in her autobiography, "In Praise of Imperfection" (1988). He also agreed to support her.

She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Turin medical school in 1936. Two years later, Mussolini issued a manifesto barring non-Aryan Italians from having professional careers. She began her research anyway, setting up a small laboratory in her home to study chick embryos, inspired by the work of Dr. Hamburger, a prominent researcher in St. Louis who also worked with the embryos.

During World War II, the family fled Turin for the countryside, and in 1943 the invasion by Germany forced them to Florence. The family returned at the close of the war, in 1945, and Dr. Hamburger soon invited Dr. Levi-Montalcini to work for a year in his lab at Washington University.

She stayed on, becoming an associate professor in 1956 and a full professor in 1958. In 1962, she helped establish the Institute of Cell Biology in Rome and became its first director. She retired from Washington University in 1977, becoming a guest professor and splitting her time between Rome and St. Louis.

Italy honored her in 2001 by making her a senator for life.

An elegant presence, confident and passionate, she was a sought-after speaker until late in life. "At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20," she said in 2009.

She never married and had no children. In addition to her autobiography, she was the author or co-author of dozens of research studies and received numerous professional awards, including the National Medal of Science.

"It is imperfection — not perfection — that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain," Dr. Levi-Montalcini wrote in her autobiography, "and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological and intellectual development."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 30, 2012

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the year Mussolini issued a manifesto barring non-Aryan Italians from having professional careers. It was 1938, not 1936.

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2 Oil Giants Face Trial in New Hampshire Water Pollution Suit

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Nearly a decade after it was first brought, a lawsuit accusing two oil giants of widespread groundwater contamination in New Hampshire is expected to present jurors with the most complex and time-consuming trial in the state's history.

The products liability case against the oil companies, Exxon Mobil and Citgo, is to go to trial in mid-January. In 2003, New Hampshire sued 26 oil companies and subsidiaries, claiming the gasoline additive M.T.B.E., or methyl tertiary butyl ether, caused groundwater contamination in a state where 60 percent of the population relies on private wells for drinking water.

New Hampshire is seeking more than $700 million in damages to test and monitor every private well and public drinking water system in the state and to cover cleanup costs where needed, according to court documents.

It is the only state to have reached the trial stage in a suit over M.T.B.E.

Other lawsuits have been brought by municipalities, water districts or individual well owners, and most filed in the past decade have ended in settlements. New York City won a $105 million federal jury verdict against Exxon Mobil in 2009 for M.T.B.E. contamination of city wells; that verdict has been appealed.

M.T.B.E. had been used in gasoline since the 1970s to increase octane and to reduce smog-causing emissions. While it was credited with cutting air pollution, it was found in the late 1990s to contaminate drinking water when gasoline is spilled or leaks into surface water or groundwater.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency had classified it as a "possible human carcinogen." New Hampshire banned its use in 2007.

All the sued oil companies except Exxon Mobil, based in Irving, Tex., and Citgo, based in Houston and owned by Venezuela, have reached settlement agreements with the state. Just last month, Shell Oil and Sunoco agreed to pay the state a total of $35 million.

When the suit was filed, the state attorney general at the time, Peter W. Heed, said M.T.B.E. contamination had caused an "unprecedented environmental problem." He said M.T.B.E. "has been associated with adverse health consequences and can render water unpalatable."

The case was tied up for years on jurisdiction issues in federal courts before being sent back to state court.

Lawyers for the defendants say that they were not liable and that M.T.B.E. functioned as it should. They also stress that the companies have cleaned up their own sites and that contamination elsewhere was caused by third parties that have not been sued.

"They haven't suffered the injury they claim they did," James Quinn, a lawyer for ExxonMobil, said during a pretrial hearing in November. He said pre-existing contaminants — including iron, radon and E. coli — could unfairly drive up damages.

Jessica Grant, a lawyer representing the state at the same pretrial hearing, said the case is about whether the oil companies designed a defective product, failed to warn consumers of the dangers of M.T.B.E. "and ignored their own experts who said don't use M.T.B.E."

Court officials in October sent a 22-page questionnaire to 500 potential jurors. It asked them whether they believed that oil companies value profits over safety and whether the companies do not fully disclose the dangers associated with their products.

After eliminating those who got their drinking water from a well and those with hardships or deep biases, lawyers this month chose 12 jurors and four alternates who were told to report to Federal District Court here in Concord on Jan. 14. They have been told to expect a four-month trial.

"Everybody who sits on this case is going to be inconvenienced," Judge Peter Fauver told prospective jurors during jury selection. "We will do everything we can to minimize the impact."

More than 50,000 exhibits have been marked for identification, and there are upward of 100 lawyers on record in the case. The witness list numbers 230.

Court officials had to improvise a special docketing system because of the number of participants and documents involved. It is one of only a handful of state court cases that have gone fully electronic, with all motions and orders being e-mailed.

Bill McGraw, the chief clerk, noted that the only other case that comes close to it in complexity is a school financing challenge of the 1990s, "and that pales in comparison to this."

"It's been a unique experience," Mr. McGraw said.

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Elwood V. Jensen, Pioneer in Breast Cancer Treatment, Dies at 92

Tony Jones/Cincinnati Enquirer, via Associated Press

Elwood V. Jensen in 2004.

Elwood V. Jensen, a medical researcher whose studies of steroid hormones led to new treatments for breast cancer that have been credited with saving or extending hundreds of thousands of lives, died on Dec. 16 in Cincinnati. He was 92.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, his son, Thomas Jensen, said.

In 2004 Dr. Jensen received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, one of the most respected science prizes in the world.

When Dr. Jensen started his research at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, steroid hormones, which alter the functioning of cells, were thought to interact with cells through a series of chemical reactions involving enzymes.

However, Dr. Jensen used radioactive tracers to show that steroid hormones actually affect cells by binding to a specific receptor protein inside them. He first focused on the steroid hormone estrogen.

By 1968, Dr. Jensen had developed a test for the presence of estrogen receptors in breast cancer cells. He later concluded that such receptors were present in about a third of those cells.

Breast cancers that are estrogen positive, meaning they have receptors for the hormone, can be treated with medications like Tamoxifen or with other methods of inhibiting estrogen in a patient's system, like removal of the ovaries. Women with receptor-rich breast cancers often go into remission when estrogen is blocked or removed.

By the mid-1980s, a test developed by Dr. Jensen and a colleague at the University of Chicago, Dr. Geoffrey Greene, could be used to determine the extent of estrogen receptors in breast and other cancers. That test became a standard part of care for breast cancer patients.

Scientists like Dr. Pierre Chambon and Dr. Ronald M. Evans, who shared the 2004 Lasker prize with Dr. Jensen, went on to show that many types of receptors exist. The receptors are crucial components of the cell's control system and transmit signals in an array of vital functions, from the development of organs in the womb to the control of fat cells and the regulation of cholesterol.

Dr. Jensen's work also led to the development of drugs that can enhance or inhibit the effects of hormones. Such drugs are used to treat prostate and other cancers.

Elwood Vernon Jensen was born in Fargo, N.D., on Jan. 13, 1920, to Eli and Vera Morris Jensen. He majored in chemistry at what was then Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio, and had begun graduate training in organic chemistry at the University of Chicago when World War II began.

Dr. Jensen wanted to join the Army Air Forces, but his poor vision kept him from becoming a pilot. During the war he synthesized poison gases at the University of Chicago, exposure to which twice put him in the hospital. His work on toxic chemicals, he said, inspired him to pursue biology and medicine.

Dr. Jensen studied steroid hormone chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology on a Guggenheim Fellowship after the war. While there, he climbed the Matterhorn, one of the highest peaks in the Alps, even though he had no mountaineering experience. He often equated his successful research to the novel approach taken by Edward Whymper, the first mountaineer to reach the Matterhorn's summit. Mr. Whymper went against conventional wisdom and scaled the mountain's Swiss face, after twice failing to reach the summit on the Italian side.

Dr. Jensen joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of surgery in 1947, working closely with the Nobel laureate Charles Huggins. He became an original member of the research team at the Ben May Laboratory for Cancer Research (now the Ben May Department for Cancer Research) in 1951, and became the director after Dr. Huggins stepped down.

He came to work at the University of Cincinnati in 2002, and continued to do research there until last year.

His first wife, the former Mary Collette, died in 1982. In addition to his son, Dr. Jensen is survived by his second wife, the former Hiltrud Herborg; a daughter, Karen C. Jensen; a sister, Margaret Brennan; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Dr. Jensen's wife was found to have breast cancer in 2005. She had the tumor removed, he said in an interview, but tested positive for the estrogen receptor and was successfully treated with a medication that prevents estrogen synthesis.

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To Save Wildlife, and Tourism, Kenyans Take Up Arms

ARCHER'S POST, Kenya — Julius Lokinyi was one of the most notorious poachers in this part of Kenya, accused of single-handedly killing as many as 100 elephants and selling the tusks by the side of the road in the dead of night, pumping vast amounts of ivory into a shadowy global underground trade.

But after being hounded, shamed, browbeaten and finally persuaded by his elders, he recently made a remarkable transformation. Elephants, he has come to believe, are actually worth more alive than dead, because of the tourists they attract. So Mr. Lokinyi stopped poaching and joined a grass-roots squad of rangers — essentially a conservation militia — to protect the wildlife he once slaughtered.

Nowadays he gets up at dawn, slurps down a cup of sugary tea, tightens his combat boots and marches off with other villagers, some who had never picked up a gun before and are little more than volunteers, to fight poachers.

"We got to protect the elephants," said Mr. Lokinyi, whose hooded eyes now glow with the zeal of a convert.

From Tanzania to Cameroon, tens of thousands of elephants are being poached each year, more than at any time in decades, because of Asia's soaring demand for ivory. Nothing seems to be stopping it, including deploying national armies, and the bullet-riddled carcasses keep stacking up. Scientists say that at this rate, African elephants could soon go the way of the wild American bison.

But in this stretch of northern Kenya, destitute villagers have seized upon an unconventional solution that, if replicated elsewhere, could be the key to saving thousands of elephants across Africa, conservationists say. In a growing number of communities here, people are so eager, even desperate, to protect their wildlife that civilians with no military experience are banding together, grabbing shotguns and G3 assault rifles and risking their lives to confront heavily armed poaching gangs.

It is essentially a militarized neighborhood watch, with loping, 6-foot-6 former herdsmen acting as the block captains, and the block being miles and miles of zebra-studded bush. These citizen-rangers are not doing this out of altruism or some undying love for pachyderms. They do it because in Kenya, perhaps more than just about anywhere else, wildlife means tourists, and tourists mean dollars — a lot of dollars.

It is not unusual here for a floppy-hatted visitor to drop $700 a night to sleep in a tent and absorb the sights, sounds and musky smells of wondrous game. Much of that money is contractually bound to go directly to impoverished local communities, which use it for everything from pumping water to college scholarships, giving them a clear financial stake in preserving wildlife. The safari business is a pillar of the Kenyan economy, generating more than a billion dollars a year and nearly 500,000 jobs: cooks, cleaners, bead-stringers, safari guides, bush pilots, even accountants to tally the proceeds.

Surprisingly, many jobs in the safari industry can pay as much as poaching. Though the ivory trade may seem lucrative, it is often like the Somali pirate business model, with the entry-level hijacker getting just a minuscule cut of the million-dollar ransoms. While a pound of ivory can fetch $1,000 on the streets of Beijing, Mr. Lokinyi, despite his lengthy poaching résumé, was broke, making it easier to lure him out of the business.

Villagers are also turning against poachers because the illegal wildlife trade fuels crime, corruption, instability and intercommunal fighting. Here in northern Kenya, poachers are diversifying into stealing livestock, printing counterfeit money and sometimes holding up tourists. Some are even buying assault rifles used in ethnic conflicts.

The conservation militias are often the only security forces around, so they have become de facto 911 squads, rushing off to all sorts of emergencies in areas too remote for the police to quickly gain access to and often getting into shootouts with poachers and bandits.

"This isn't just about animals," said Paul Elkan, a director at the Wildlife Conservation Society, who is trying to set up community ranger squads in South Sudan modeled on the Kenyan template. "It's about security, conflict reconciliation, even nation building."

The rangers tend to be hardened and uneducated, drawn from different ethnic groups and the surplus of unemployed youth. Gabriel Lesoipa was a goat herder; Joseph Lopeiyok, a cattle rustler; John Pameri won his coveted spot because he was fast — at the time he was selected, the first entry requirement was a grueling 11-mile race.

Many are considered warriors in their communities, experts in so-called bushcraft from years of grazing cattle and goats across the thorny savanna — and defending them against armed raiders. They can follow faint footprints across long, thirsty distances and instantly intuit when someone has trespassed on their land.

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Dot Earth: Peabody Coal Sales Ticker Next to 'Clean Energy' Claim

Dec. 29, 12:38 a.m. | Updated below |Electricity, including that generated by coal combustion, has been a boon for humanity. In fact, there's much truth in the headline on Indur M. Goklany's new analysis for the anti-regulatory Cato Institute: "Humanity Unbound: How Fossil Fuels Saved Humanity from Nature and Nature from Humanity." (I'll post more on that paper soon, including an interview with Goklany.)

But that does not come close to justifying what you see on the home page of Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the free world:

Coal Sales and a Clean Energy Claim

Just to the right of a ticker-style, real-time tally of tons of coal sold (about eight tons per second or so) is the message that the company is the* "global leader in clean energy solutions…"

Pollution from coal burning, in the United States and particularly in developing countries, has big impacts on public health, and the climate impact from coal-generated carbon dioxide could be enormous if the world's still-vast reserves are heavily exploited. We've been stuck on the coal rung of what Loren Eiseley called "the heat ladder" of energy history for too long.

I sent a site link and the video clip above to Nicholas Muller of Middlebury College and William D. Nordhaus and Robert O. Mendelsohn of Yale, authors of this influential 2011 paper in American Economics Review: "Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy." One of its many conclusions was that "coal-fired power plants have air pollution damages larger than their value added."

As I put it in my note to them, "I find it hard to reconcile your calculation of coal's big externalized costs with such a juxtaposition (coal sales and "clean energy" leadership):

You can read the reply from Mendelsohn below, followed by more from Bob Keefe of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Vic Svec, a spokesman for Peabody Energy:

Here's Mendelsohn:

We did not make any company specific estimates of damage. If Peabody is responsible for 23 percent of U.S. coal and if each ton of Peabody coal causes the average damage from coal in the U.S., the burning of Peabody coal is causing $12 billion of damage from traditional health related air pollutants and almost $16 billion of damage including greenhouse gases every year. Few companies can boast more.

I also asked him if they'd gotten any significant pushback on their findings so far. Here's his reply:

Academically, there has been nothing but positive feedback so far. Politically, so far, there is no push back. However, if there was ever a hint of legislation based on our work, I am sure that it would heat up considerably.

I sent the same query to Bob Keefe, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He put his reaction bluntly:

Juxtaposing its coal sales against its shamefully blatantly false claims of being "a global leader in clean energy solutions" is baffling — but also indicative of Peabody Energy's inexplicable approach to the environment and the communities in which it operates.

The only way you could possibly believe Peabody's claim that it "advances environmental excellence" is if you believe breathing pollution and toxins is part of a good health routine.

Peabody consistently ranks as one of the worst polluters on the planet. If it put only a fraction of the time and money it spends on fighting environmental safeguards into actually pursing clean energy solutions, we'd all be better off.

See these links for more:

"The 15 Worst Companies For The Planet" (Business Insider Green Sheet)

Green Rankings, the 2009 List (Newsweek)

"Climate-denying Indiana Regulator helps ALEC Coal Companies Delay EPA Climate Rules" (Polluter Watch)

Finally, here's the response from Vic Svec from Peabody:

We note on the front page of our website that Peabody Energy is the world's largest private-sector coal company and a global leader in sustainable mining and clean coal solutions. One of the great untold environmental stories is the enormous progress in clean energy that has occurred in recent decades.

We forget to celebrate the enormous progress that has been made in clean coal in recent decades. The core U.S. coal statistic is this: criteria emissions from coal use in the U.S. have declined a stunning 87% since 1970, during a time when coal use has nearly tripled. "Smokestacks" for coal plants have now become steam stacks, thanks to wet and dry ESPs, baghouses, low-NOx burners, SCRs, activated carbon injection and a host of other technologies.

In addition, using coal in large centralized plants dramatically reduces the burning of fuel wood and waste that causes enormous indoor air pollution in developing nations. And we know that low-cost coal-fueled electricity has helped to bring about an explosion of electrotechnologies: your coal-fueled mail delivery – e-mail – has dramatically lower emissions than traditional mail.

New supercritical coal plants represent another leap forward. Consider the Prairie State Energy Campus, with more than $1 billion in clean coal technologies and criteria emissions some 80% below the existing coal fleet… along with a carbon dioxide emission rate some 40% below existing plants. Prairie State is also a great example of green jobs, with thousands of workers involved in construction of the large coal plant. And Prairie State has a cost of fuel that less than one-third that of even currently suppressed U.S. natural gas prices.

Ironically, U.S. environmentalists have been a major reason more supercritical coal plants haven't been used in the United States, even taking credit for killing state-of-the-art new coal construction in the past decade. China is building far more such plants because they recognize that coal is essential to power a healthy economy and the new generation of coal plants offer great environmental advantage. Also, Peabody is proud to be the only non-Chinese partner in GreenGen, which just started up in Tianjin, China, as a major coal gasification plant that will ultimately reuse carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery.

Coal has been the fastest growing fuel in the world for the past decade, and has been projected to pass oil as the world's largest energy source next year. Its abundance and low-cost profile make coal essential for powering the world's best economies and helping to move hundreds of millions of people to cities… and to the middle class. Those are enormous societal benefits, and technology can ensure that his be done in an environmentally friendly way.

Dec. 29, 12:09 a.m. | Updated |
* There've been several interesting developments related to the section marked with an asterisk:

1) In a comment, Peter Gleick noted that, while I wrote that the company said it is a global leader in clean energy solutions, it actually stated on its home page that it is "the global leader in clean energy solutions." I've changed the text from "a" to "the."

2) Another commenter, Bob Armstrong, protested, quoting from the Web site as follows:

No , it says: "Peabody Energy is the global leader in CLEAN COAL solutions and advances environmental excellence in coal mining and use."

It turns out they're both right, in that it said what Gleick asserted when I recorded my video loop of the page on Dec. 19 and now says what Armstrong quoted.

I'll ask Vic Svec why the wording changed. Perhaps the first version was not supported by the facts?

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Death Valley Temperature Record Is Restored

Eric Thayer for The New York Times

A 134-degree reading registered on July 10, 1913, at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley, Calif., is now the official world record.

FURNACE CREEK, Calif. — For Death Valley, a place that embraces its extremes, this has long been an affront: As furnace-hot as it gets here, it could not lay claim to being the hottest place on earth. That honor, as it were, has gone since 1922 to a city on the northwestern tip of Libya.

Until now. After a yearlong investigation by a team of climate scientists, the World Meteorological Organization, the climate agency of the United Nations, announced this fall that it was throwing out a reading of 136.4 degrees claimed by the city of Al Aziziyah on Sept. 13, 1922. It made official what anyone who has soldiered through a Death Valley summer afternoon here could attest to. There is no place hotter in the world. A 134-degree reading registered on July 10, 1913, at Greenland Ranch here is now the official world record.

And while people were not quite jumping up and down at the honor, the 134-degree reading has inspired the kind of civic pride that for most communities might come with having a winning Little League baseball team.

"For those of us who survive here in the summer, it was no surprise that it's the hottest place on the world," said Charlie Callaghan, a Death Valley National Park ranger who personally recorded a 129-degree day here a few years back.

The opening wall panel in a new exhibition at the National Park Service visitor center off Highway 190 has been unveiled with a burst of superlatives: "Hottest. Driest. Lowest." (Lowest refers to a spot in Death Valley, Badwater Basin, which at 282 feet below sea level is the lowest place in North America.)

Promotional leaflets that still boast of Death Valley as being merely the hottest place in the United States are being rewritten, and resort owners say they are girding for a crush of heat-seeking visitors come next summer. There is even talk of having an official 100-year celebration of the record-setting measurement next July.

"It's about time for science, but I think we all knew it was coming," said Randy Banis, the editor of DeathValley.com, an online newsletter promoting the valley. "You don't underestimate Death Valley. Most of us enthusiasts are proud that the extremes that we have known about at Death Valley are indeed the most harsh on earth."

Still, the designation was a momentous event among this nation's community of climatologists — or, as some of them proudly refer to themselves, "weather geeks" — the climax of a long debate set off by a blog item written by Christopher C. Burt, a meteorologist with Weather Underground. Mr. Burt cited numerous reasons to be suspicious of the Libyan claim, which he described in an interview the other day as "completely garbage."

"The more we looked at it, the more obvious it appeared to be an error," he said.

Mr. Burt brought his blog post to the attention of members of the World Meteorological Organization. Randall S. Cerveny, a geology professor at Arizona State University who holds the title rapporteur of climate extremes for the World Climate Organization, appointed a committee of 13 climatologists, including himself and Mr. Burt, to resolve what can often be tricky disputes.

"There are a lot of places that do like these records," he said. "It can be a source of pride for that country or a source of contention for other countries. Politics unfortunately is going to play a role sometime in the determining of these records."

It took a year to investigate the claim — the inquiry was hampered by the revolution in Libya, which resulted in the temporary disappearance of a Libyan scientist who was central to the work. The final report found five reasons to disqualify the Libya claim, including questionable instruments, an inexperienced observer who made the reading and the fact that the reading was anomalous for that region and in the context of other temperatures reported in Libya that day.

"The W.M.O. assessment is that the highest recorded surface temperature of 56.7 degrees C (134 degrees F) was measured on 10 July 1913" in Death Valley, the report said.

The announcement was made on Sept. 11, the same day as the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, and thus drew little notice.

Though it is easy to forget on days when it is so hot that people dare not step out of their cars, part of the allure of Death Valley has always been — besides the staggering beauty of its canyons, mountains and sunsets — the sheer challenge of visiting it.

"I think there might be such a thing as a weather tourist," Mr. Burt said. "I may be one."

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F.D.A. Approves Eliquis From Bristol and Pfizer

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved Eliquis, an anticlotting drug that has been highly anticipated by cardiologists and is expected to be a blockbuster for Bristol-Myers Squibb, which will make the drug, and Pfizer, which will help market it.

The agency approved Eliquis for reducing the risk of stroke and dangerous blood clots in people with atrial fibrillation, a common heart arrhythmia that afflicts millions of people in the United States.

The drug, also known as apixaban, is the third anticlotting medicine to be approved in recent years and the companies are expected to aggressively compete to pitch their products as a replacement for warfarin, an older treatment that requires more careful monitoring. Warfarin is also known by the brand name Coumadin.

"The marketing games will now begin," said Dr. Sanjay Kaul, a cardiologist at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the development of any of the drugs.

He said that cardiologists would now have to sort out the differences among Eliquis and its competitors already on the market: Pradaxa, sold by Boehringer Ingelheim, and Xarelto, sold by Johnson & Johnson and Bayer.

While some experts have argued that Eliquis offers the best balance between the drug's benefits and risks, Dr. Kaul said since there have been no clinical trials comparing the three new drugs, "it is impossible to adjudicate which of these new agents is the preferred one."

Bristol-Myers and Pfizer issued a brief statement Friday saying they were pleased with the approval. In a news release in November announcing the drug's approval in Europe, Bristol-Myers noted that Eliquis was the only drug in the group that has shown an advantage over warfarin in reducing the risk of stroke and dangerous blood clots, major bleeding and death.

The agency also warned that patients with prosthetic heart valves should not take Eliquis, nor should patients with atrial fibrillation that is caused by a heart valve problem.

Despite the promise of Eliquis and the other new drugs, some cautioned against prescribing them too enthusiastically.

Dr. Garret FitzGerald, a cardiologist and chairman of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania, said the trial results for Eliquis were impressive. But he added in an e-mail on Friday: "What matters to a patient is the individual effect in them."

He noted that patients taking Eliquis also suffered major bleeding episodes and said all drugs that prevent clotting carried a risk of bleeding. "Thus the F.D.A.'s warning to be on the lookout for bleeding seems just as appropriate as approval of Eliquis," he said.

Dr. Kaul says he tends to wait to prescribe new drugs until he learns more from the experience of colleagues, and Eliquis will be no exception. "I'm going to sit back by the sidelines and see how it pans out," he said, adding that he had begun to prescribe Pradaxa and Xarelto to patients.

Eliquis's entry into the United States market has been eagerly anticipated by Bristol-Myers and Pfizer after a succession of delays this year. Bristol-Myers, in particular, has been struggling since its best-selling blood-thinner drug, Plavix, lost its patent protection in May. Sales of Plavix, which Bristol-Myers sells in partnership with Sanofi, fell 96 percent in the third quarter of this year after cheaper generic alternatives flooded the market and the company has struggled to replace the lost sales.

Eliquis is "very important for Bristol because it's one of the legs of their investment case, that they can leapfrog over the Plavix expiration," said Les Funtleyder, the fund manager of Poliwogg, a private equity and hedge fund. He said he expected Eliquis to eventually earn more than $1 billion for its sellers.

In such a crowded field of competitors, Mr. Funtleyder said, consumers and doctors should brace themselves for a marketing onslaught. "I wonder if we'll see our first Eliquis commercial before the new year," he said.

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Wind Farm Developers Race Against End of Tax Credit

WASHINGTON — Forget about parties, resolutions or watching the ball drop. To Iberdrola Renewables, New Year's Eve will mean checking on last-minute details like the data connections between 169 new wind turbines in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and California and its control center in Portland, Ore.

All over the country, developers are in a sprint to get new wind farms up and running before Tuesday, when the federal wind production tax credit will disappear like Cinderella's ball gown. After that, the nation's wind-farm building will be at a virtual standstill.

The stakes of meeting the deadline are enormous. Wind turbines that are connected to the grid and in commercial service before midnight on New Year's Eve are entitled to a 2.2 cent tax credit for each kilowatt-hour they generate in their first 10 years, which comes out to about $1 million for a big turbine. As it stands now, those that enter service on Jan. 1 or later are out of luck.

The deadline is a bit like the April 15 one for filing income taxes, but "there are no extensions here," said Paul Copleman, a spokesman for Iberdrola. To reduce the risk of missing it — a risk that increases when managing construction projects on mountaintops in New England in the winter — the company allowed more than a year for what are normally nine-month construction projects.

More than just individual projects are at risk; the wind industry says it expects installations to decline by 90 percent next year, with the loss of thousands of jobs. The erratic pattern of wind subsidies has spawned a boom-and-bust cycle, with supplier companies building factories that run at full production for months and then shut down when demand collapses.

The industry has long experience with drop-dead deadlines: since the tax credit began in the early 1990s, it has expired three times, said Elizabeth A. Salerno, director of industry data and analysis at the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group based in Washington. Each time, new installations fell from 73 percent to 93 percent, according to the association.

Congress, which last renewed the credit as part of the 2009 fiscal stimulus package, balked at an extension this year. Opponents argue that the money spent so far, about $14.7 billion, is enough, and that a renewal could cost about $12.2 billion were it to last for 10 years. They also complain that the credit allows wind machines to be profitable even when there is a surplus of electricity and the market price for it falls to zero.

The tax credit could be equal to one-sixth to one-half of the revenue from the wind turbine, depending on electricity prices in the area of the generator.

Wind advocates say that the wind production tax credit did not cost the taxpayers any money, because it stimulated economic activity, in the form of manufacturing and construction, that was taxed at the federal, state and local levels.

Iberdrola's wind farm near Rosamond, Calif., with 126 turbines, opened last week. The company said it was "extremely optimistic" that its 19-turbine farm in Monroe and Florida, Mass., and a 24-turbine farm in Groton, N.H., would be up and running by Monday night, but declined to say precisely when.

 According to the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the Energy Department, wind developers were planning to install 12,000 megawatts of wind capacity this year, but as of Nov. 30, only about 6,000 megawatts had been completed.

The remaining 6,000 megawatts works out to more than 3,000 turbines: if they are all operating by late Monday night, the wind industry will have added 12 percent to its capacity in a single month. (A megawatt is the power required by, say, everything in a full-size Walmart with an included supermarket. Over the course of a year, however, a turbine produces only about one-third of its theoretical maximum capacity.)  

Iberdrola did not disclose the price of each wind farm, but the industry average is about $2 million per megawatt, meaning that the three projects may have cost a total of more than $500 million.

Wind advocates say they will seek to revive the tax credit when a new Congress convenes next month, but it will not be at the top of Congress's agenda.

With the tax credit due to expire, few developers are now taking the early steps required to establish a wind farm, like negotiating deals to sell the power and ordering the equipment. Mr. Copleman, the Iberdrola spokesman, said his company had a variety of projects "at various stages" but was "unlikely to be pouring any concrete next year."

For projects being wrapped up now, Ms. Salerno said, developers lined up power purchase agreements with utilities and then arranged financing a year and a half to two years ago, with the economics predicated on the tax credit.

The start-and-stop pattern of recent years has repeatedly affected companies up and down the chain, especially the highly specialized ones that make towers, blades and generators. Robert Thresher, a wind expert at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, Colo., said manufacturers were "trying to run down their inventory so they wouldn't be caught holding turbines" after the market collapsed in January.

A study commissioned by the wind industry predicts the loss of 37,000 jobs as a result of the credit's expiration. For example, the Spanish company Gamesa, which built the giant blades for the New Hampshire project at its factory in Ebensburg, Pa., has announced the layoffs of more than 150 workers.

Some members of Congress have proposed that the credit be renewed, perhaps with a phaseout over a few years. A one-year extension would be of little use: Ms. Salerno said it would not give developers enough time to get new projects financed, built and put on the grid before the expiration date, even if they had already completed environmental studies and obtained the various permits required.

A one-year extension would work for developers, she said, but only "if you knew 24 months ahead of time that this was going to happen."

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In Ireland, Carbon Taxes Pay Off

DUBLIN — Over the last three years, with its economy in tatters, Ireland embraced a novel strategy to help reduce its staggering deficit: charging households and businesses for the environmental damage they cause.

The government imposed taxes on most of the fossil fuels used by homes, offices, vehicles and farms, based on each fuel's carbon dioxide emissions, a move that immediately drove up prices for oil, natural gas and kerosene. Household trash is weighed at the curb, and residents are billed for anything that is not being recycled.

The Irish now pay purchase taxes on new cars and yearly registration fees that rise steeply in proportion to the vehicle's emissions.

Environmentally and economically, the new taxes have delivered results. Long one of Europe's highest per-capita producers of greenhouse gases, with levels nearing those of the United States, Ireland has seen its emissions drop more than 15 percent since 2008.

Although much of that decline can be attributed to a recession, changes in behavior also played a major role, experts say, noting that the country's emissions dropped 6.7 percent in 2011 even as the economy grew slightly.

"We are not saints like those Scandinavians — we were lapping up fossil fuels, buying bigger cars and homes, very American," said Eamon Ryan, who was Ireland's energy minister from 2007 to 2011. "We just set up a price signal that raised significant revenue and changed behavior. Now, we're smashing through the environmental targets we set for ourselves."

By contrast, carbon taxes are viewed as politically toxic in the United States. Republican leaders in Congress have pledged to block any proposal for such a tax, and President Obama has not advocated one, although the idea has drawn support from economists of varying ideologies.

Yet when the Irish were faced with new environmental taxes, they quickly shifted to greener fuels and cars and began recycling with fervor. Automakers like Mercedes found ways to make powerful cars with an emissions rating as low as tinier Nissans. With less trash, landfills closed. And as fossil fuels became more costly, renewable energy sources became more competitive, allowing Ireland's wind power industry to thrive.

Even more significantly, revenue from environmental taxes has played a crucial role in helping Ireland reduce a daunting deficit by several billion euros each year.

The three-year-old carbon tax has raised nearly one billion euros ($1.3 billion) over all, including 400 million euros in 2012. That provided the Irish government with 25 percent of the 1.6 billion euros in new tax revenue it needed to narrow its budget gap this year and avert a rise in income tax rates.

The International Monetary Fund, which oversees the rescue plan, recently suggested that Ireland should "expand the well-designed carbon tax" and its automobile taxes to generate even more money.

Although first proposed by the Green Party, the environmental taxes enjoy the support of all major political parties "because it puts a lot of money on the table," said Frank Convery, an economist at University College Dublin. The bailout plan for 2013 requires Ireland to embrace a mix of new tax revenues and spending cuts.

Not everyone is happy. The prices of basic commodities like gasoline and heating oil have risen 5 to 10 percent. This is particularly hard on the poor, although the government has provided subsidies for low-income families to better insulate homes, for example. And industries complain that the higher prices have made it harder for them to compete outside Ireland.

"Prices just keep going up, and a lot of people think it's a scam," said Imelda Lyons, 45, as she filled her car at a gas station here. "You call it a carbon tax, but what good is being done with it to help the environment?"

The coalition government that enacted the taxes was voted out of office last year. "Just imagine President Obama saying in the debate, 'I've got this great idea, but it's going to increase your gasoline price,' " said Mr. Ryan, who lost his seat in the last election and now leads the Green Party. "People didn't exactly cheer us on."

A recent report estimated that a modest carbon tax in the United States that increased incrementally over time could generate about $1.25 trillion in revenue from 2012 to 2022, reducing the 10-year deficit by 50 percent, based on projections from the Congressional Budget Office.

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Lisa P. Jackson of E.P.A. to Step Down

Lisa P. Jackson is stepping down as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency after a four-year tenure that began with high hopes of sweeping action to address climate change and other environmental ills but ended with a series of rear-guard actions to defend the agency against challenges from industry, Republicans in Congress and, at times, the Obama White House.

Ms. Jackson, 50, told President Obama shortly after his re-election in November that she wanted to leave the administration early next year. She informed the E.P.A. staff of her decision on Thursday morning and issued a brief statement saying that she was confident "the ship is sailing in the right direction."

She has not said what she intends to do after leaving government, and no successor was immediately named, although it is expected that Robert Perciasepe, the E.P.A. deputy administrator, will take over at least temporarily.

Ms. Jackson's departure comes as many in the environmental movement are questioning Mr. Obama's commitment to dealing with climate change and other environmental problems. After his re-election, and a campaign in which global warming was barely mentioned by either candidate, Mr. Obama said that his first priority would be jobs and the economy and that he intended only to foster a "conversation" on climate change in the coming months.

That ambivalence is a far cry from the hopes that accompanied his early months in office, when he identified climate change as one of humanity's defining challenges. Mr. Obama put the White House's full lobbying power behind a House cap-and-trade bill that would have limited climate-altering emissions and brought profound changes in how the nation produces and consumes energy.

But after the effort stalled in the Senate, the administration abandoned broad-scale climate change efforts, instead focusing on smaller regulatory actions largely though the Clean Air Act.

White House and E.P.A. officials said that Ms. Jackson's decision to leave government was her own and that the timing had been negotiated with the White House.

Mr. Obama praised her in a statement, calling her "an important part of my team."

"Over the last four years, Lisa Jackson has shown an unwavering commitment to the health of our families and our children," the president said. "Under her leadership, the E.P.A. has taken sensible and important steps to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink, including implementing the first national standard for harmful mercury pollution, taking important action to combat climate change under the Clean Air Act, and playing a key role in establishing historic fuel economy standards that will save the average American family thousands of dollars at the pump, while also slashing carbon pollution."

After Republicans took control of the House in 2010, Ms. Jackson became a favored target of the new Republican majority's aversion to what it termed "job-killing regulations." One coal industry official accused her of waging "regulatory jihad," and she was summoned to testify before hostile House committees dozens of times in 2011. She was frequently subjected to harsh questioning that at times bordered on the disrespectful.

Ms. Jackson, the first African-American to head the E.P.A., brushed off that treatment as part of the territory and a reflection of the new partisan reality in Washington. More difficult for her was the occasional lack of support from environmental groups, who saw every compromise as a betrayal, and from the White House, which was trying to balance worries about the economy and the president's re-election campaign against the perceived costs of tough environmental policies.

The White House rejected or scaled back a number of proposed new regulations from the environmental agency, most notably the withdrawal of a proposed new standard for ozone pollution that Ms. Jackson sought in the summer of 2011. Mr. Obama rejected the proposal on the grounds that it would be too costly for industry and local government to comply with at a time of continuing economic distress. Other new rules, including those for emissions from industrial boilers and cement factories, were either watered down or their introduction delayed after complaints from lawmakers, lobbyists and businesses.

Despite a number of disappointments, however, Ms. Jackson has achieved some notable firsts, including the finding that carbon dioxide and five other gases that contribute to global warming meet the definition of pollutants under the Clean Air Act. That so-called endangerment finding, which has survived federal court challenges from industry, allowed the agency to negotiate strict new emissions standards for cars and light trucks, the first time the federal government has limited global warming pollution.

The new vehicle standards will eliminate billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions and double the fuel efficiency of the American light-duty transportation fleet over the next decade.

The finding also formed the basis of the first steps toward regulating greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants and, possibly, toward requiring existing ones to reduce global warming pollution. The rule governing new power plants in effect bans the construction of new coal-fired power plants unless they capture carbon dioxide emissions, a technology so far unproven on a commercial scale.

The E.P.A. under Ms. Jackson also established the first standards for emissions of mercury, arsenic and other airborne toxins from power plants, and finalized a rule reducing industrial pollution that crosses state borders. The latter rule was struck down by a federal court and is under appeal.

Ms. Jackson, a native of New Orleans who holds chemical engineering degrees from Tulane and Princeton, has spent most of her professional career at the E.P.A. She led the Department of Environmental Protection in New Jersey from 2006 to 2008 under Gov. Jon S. Corzine, who named her his chief of staff in late 2008, shortly before Mr. Obama chose her to head the federal environmental agency.

This month, the E.P.A.'s inspector general, prodded by Republicans in Congress, announced that he was opening an inquiry into Ms. Jackson's use of a secondary e-mail account to conduct business inside the agency. Ms. Jackson has said that she used the second account because her public e-mail address was widely known and that her e-mail alias — "Richard Windsor" — derived from the name of her dog and her former home in Windsor Township, N.J.

It is not known when the inquiry will be completed.

In a brief interview on Wednesday evening, Ms. Jackson said that she hoped to decompress after four intense years running the E.P.A., which has 17,000 employees and an $8 billion annual budget. She said she would probably do some consulting and public speaking but has not begun looking for a new job. She is thought to be a candidate for the presidency of Princeton.

Asked what she considered most important in her tenure, Ms. Jackson mentioned the endangerment finding, because it was the first time that the federal government began to address climate change. She also said that although it received little notice during her tenure, she was proud of her role in expanding the environmental agenda to include voices that have been little heard, including low-income communities, Native Alaskans and American Indian tribes.

"Before me," she said, "some people said that African-Americans don't care about the environment. I don't think that will ever be the case again."

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These Were a Few of Their Favorite Things

Science Times asked five noted scientists about the toys they remember from childhood.

Podcast: Science Times

This week we take up a history of science toys. And if you've ever wondered what toys the reporters and editors at the Science Times adored as children, well, we got that too.

Maria Zuber

54, geophysicist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Of course I loved my chemistry set. I played with that a great deal and mixed together toxic things and household things, probably at age 10 or 11. It had flasks and test tubes and gave you small amounts of different elements you could mix together, things that changed color. It came with little paper sheets so you could measure the pH and tell if something was an acid or a base. I'm one of those odd people who read chemistry books for fun at that age.

Mike Brown

47, astronomer, California Institute of Technology, and author of "How I Killed Pluto"

ASTRONOMER Mike Brown, right, and his brother Andy with a toy rocket.

I did everything with Lego blocks. We just had boxes full of squares and rectangles and made buildings and contraptions that ran down strings. We experimented with things that had wheels and pulleys. My brother and I would try to make traps we would try to spring on each other. By 12 or 13, I was blowing up things with firecrackers and calcium carbide. At one point I gave myself second-degree burns on my arms.

Nancy Hopkins

69, biologist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A favorite toy for years was a construction set with metal pieces and magnets, all in bright colors that you could build things with. There were flat metal pieces and magnets of different strengths and sizes and everything in a different color. My mother was an artist, and we used to go every weekend to the Museum of Modern Art. I loved modern art. I liked Kandinsky. These magnets reminded me of him.

I can still remember being dragged screaming from it at bedtime, and recall the feel of the pieces.

Jonathan Eisen

44, evolutionary biologist, University of California, Davis, and academic editor in chief of PLoS Biology

BIOLOGIST Jonathan Eisen loved exploring nature in the backyard.

When I was a kid, it was much more a magnifying glass and go out into the yard and look at things. We would just go out and look at ants and roly-polies. Being able to see things close up was very cool. With our children (ages 5 and 7) we rear painted lady butterflies and chrysalises and eggs and watch them hatch into caterpillars. Silkworms, too. They are voracious eaters.

Jane Lubchenco

65, administrator of NOAA and under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere

The stereotypical science toys like microscopes and Erector Sets never really sparked my imagination. I was much more enamored with the outside world. I grew up in the 1950s in Colorado, and we spent a lot of time in the Rockies hiking and fishing. I was a veteran collector. I went through a wildflower phase and a rock phase. I was a girl scout for many years, and pretty much every outdoor science badge you could do, I did.

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New Delhi Journal: Indian City Overwhelmed by Air Pollution – New Delhi Journal

The heavy smog has dissipated for the moment, but it has left behind a troubling reality for one of India's most important cities: Despite measures to improve air quality, pollution is steadily worsening here, without any simple solutions in sight.

"This is like a ding-dong battle," said Sheila Dikshit, the chief minister of the State of Delhi, moving her fingers like the flippers of a pinball machine. "We catch up with something; the pressures catch up more than that."

Delhi, a growing metropolis of nearly 20 million people, has struggled to reconcile its rapid economic growth with environmental safeguards. Over a decade ago, the city introduced a host of policies that raised emission standards, closed polluting industries and expanded green spaces. It made a costly investment to convert the city's buses and auto rickshaws to compressed natural gas. For a time, air quality visibly improved.

But those gains have been overwhelmed in recent years. "We have already plucked the low-hanging fruits, so to speak," said Anumita Roychowdhury, the executive director of the Center for Science and Environment here. "Now it's time for aggressive, second-generation reforms."

Ms. Roychowdhury and other environmentalists say the government must now concentrate on slowing the rising number of vehicles on New Delhi's roads. Each day, about 1,400 new vehicles hit the roads of the city, already home to over seven million registered vehicles, a 65 percent jump from 2003. As a result, fine-particle pollution has risen by 47 percent in the last decade. Nitrogen dioxide levels have increased by 57 percent.

Environmentalists recommend a hefty tax on diesel vehicles, a steep increase in parking charges and a rapid upgrade of the public transportation system to ensure more timely bus service and a better integration of buses and the metro rail system.

"These strategies can be implemented immediately and will have an immediate impact on the numbers of vehicles," Ms. Roychowdhury said. "We have to stop this untamed motorization now."

But government officials say that a mere crackdown on vehicles ignores other aspects of the problem. They note that New Delhi is landlocked and lacks the coastal breezes that flush polluted air out of other major Indian cities like Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. Ms. Dikshit said New Delhi's rapidly growing population and prosperity add to the pollution.

"It's an epicenter of trade, of commerce, of governance for this entire northern area," she said. As a consequence, Delhi "bears a much bigger burden."

Officials say much of the pollution comes from neighboring areas, where emissions standards are lower and environmental policies virtually nonexistent. For days after November's smog spell, many Delhi officials responded by blaming a coincidence of factors, including agricultural burnings in the neighboring states of Punjab and Haryana and the impact of a cyclone off the southern coast.

Weather conditions played a role, environmentalists agree, but that is no excuse for ignoring the underlying problems.

"The government cannot say that the smog was solely because of bad weather," said Mukesh Khare, a professor of environmental engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. "They are making excuses to avoid facing the fact that Delhi has a pollution problem once again."

Until two years ago, environmentalists and city officials in New Delhi lacked monitoring equipment to determine air pollution levels, and scientists and policy makers were dependent on ad hoc surveys conducted manually or on data from the national pollution body that often were incomplete or arrived too late.

In 2010, the Delhi government posted six state-of-the-art monitoring machines around the capital that now constantly measure a host of pollutants, sending real-time data to a publicly accessible Web site.

"We didn't really understand the situation before," said Mohan George, a scientist at the Delhi Pollution Control Committee. "Now we have authentic, continuous and reliable data."

In November, the machines recorded pollution levels at least six or seven times greater than the national standard for safe air. On Nov. 9, for instance, the levels of particulate matter called PM10 near the University of Delhi measured 908 micrograms per cubic meter, against the standard limit of 100, falling into the "very unhealthy" category.

The city's doctors are worried. Dr. Randeep Guleria, who runs the pulmonary medicine department at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, said the number of emergency visits relating to respiratory and heart problems had risen sharply this winter.

What is going on in New Delhi reflects a larger trend. A recent study published in the medical journal Lancet shows air pollution has become a major health risk in developing countries, contributing to about 3.2 million premature deaths worldwide. South Asian countries are particularly vulnerable, the study found.

The local government has commissioned a study to understand what exactly caused the smog, and is working on an "air action plan" that would expand the subway system, introduce a network of bike lanes and make the city's roadways more friendly to pedestrians.

The Supreme Court, which has played the role of environmental watchdog in Delhi for more than a decade, has recommended a more politically delicate measure: imposing an "environment compensation charge" of 25 percent on new diesel vehicles and requiring a much smaller fee for existing gasoline- and diesel-powered cars.

Ms. Dikshit, Delhi's chief minister, has agreed to consider such a "green tax" and welcomed other solutions, even as she denied that the city's pollution was reaching alarming levels.

"What is alarming is the impact that Delhi's prosperity and its comfortable living is having on attracting more and more people to come here," Ms. Dikshit said. "How much we will be able to sustain that impact of people coming and never going out is a big question."

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Elwood V. Jensen, Pioneer in Breast Cancer Treatment, Dies at 92

Elwood V. Jensen, a medical researcher whose studies of steroid hormones led to new treatments for breast cancer that have been credited with saving or extending hundreds of thousands of lives, died on Dec. 16 in Cincinnati. He was 92.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, his son, Thomas Jensen, said.

In 2004 Dr. Jensen received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, one of the most respected science prizes in the world.

When Dr. Jensen started his research at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, steroid hormones, which alter the functioning of cells, were thought to interact with cells through a series of chemical reactions involving enzymes.

However, Dr. Jensen used radioactive tracers to show that steroid hormones actually affect cells by binding to a specific receptor protein inside them. He first focused on the steroid hormone estrogen.

By 1968, Dr. Jensen had developed a test for the presence of estrogen receptors in breast cancer cells. He later concluded that such receptors were present in about a third of those cells.

Breast cancers that are estrogen positive, meaning they have receptors for the hormone, can be treated with medications like Tamoxifen or with other methods of inhibiting estrogen in a patient's system, like removal of the ovaries. Women with receptor-rich breast cancers often go into remission when estrogen is blocked or removed.

By the mid-1980s, a test developed by Dr. Jensen and a colleague at the University of Chicago, Dr. Geoffrey Greene, could be used to determine the extent of estrogen receptors in breast and other cancers. That test became a standard part of care for breast cancer patients.

Scientists like Dr. Pierre Chambon and Dr. Ronald M. Evans, who shared the 2004 Lasker prize with Dr. Jensen, went on to show that many types of receptors exist. The receptors are crucial components of the cell's control system and transmit signals in an array of vital functions, from the development of organs in the womb to the control of fat cells and the regulation of cholesterol.

Dr. Jensen's work also led to the development of drugs that can enhance or inhibit the effects of hormones. Such drugs are used to treat prostate and other cancers.

Elwood Vernon Jensen was born in Fargo, N.D., on Jan. 13, 1920, to Eli and Vera Morris Jensen. He majored in chemistry at what was then Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio, and had begun graduate training in organic chemistry at the University of Chicago when World War II began.

Dr. Jensen wanted to join the Army Air Forces, but his poor vision kept him from becoming a pilot. During the war he synthesized poison gases at the University of Chicago, exposure to which twice put him in the hospital. His work on toxic chemicals, he said, inspired him to pursue biology and medicine.

Dr. Jensen studied steroid hormone chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology on a Guggenheim Fellowship after the war. While there, he climbed the Matterhorn, one of the highest peaks in the Alps, even though he had no mountaineering experience. He often equated his successful research to the novel approach taken by Edward Whymper, the first mountaineer to reach the Matterhorn's summit. Mr. Whymper went against conventional wisdom and scaled the mountain's Swiss face, after twice failing to reach the summit on the Italian side.

Dr. Jensen joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of surgery in 1947, working closely with the Nobel laureate Charles Huggins. He became an original member of the research team at the Ben May Laboratory for Cancer Research (now the Ben May Department for Cancer Research) in 1951, and became the director after Dr. Huggins stepped down.

He came to work at the University of Cincinnati in 2002, and continued to do research there until last year.

His first wife, the former Mary Collette, died in 1982. In addition to his son, Dr. Jensen is survived by his second wife, the former Hiltrud Herborg; a daughter, Karen C. Jensen; a sister, Margaret Brennan; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Dr. Jensen's wife was found to have breast cancer in 2005. She had the tumor removed, he said in an interview, but tested positive for the estrogen receptor and was successfully treated with a medication that prevents estrogen synthesis.

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U.S. Faces Shortage in Paying for Upkeep of Retired Chimps

Tim Mueller for The New York Times

Two infant chimpanzees at the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana. The N.I.H. recently announced that it would move 113 chimpanzees it houses there to Chimp Haven, the national chimpanzee sanctuary.

As the National Institutes of Health reduces its use of chimpanzees in invasive biomedical research, it is moving more chimps to retirement homes. But the agency could face a problem in paying for their continuing support, officials say.

Last week the N.I.H. announced that it would move 113 chimpanzees it owns from the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana to Chimp Haven, the national chimpanzee sanctuary, also in Louisiana. The move was welcomed by animal welfare groups.

Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, said in a statement, "This is a ray of light for captive chimpanzees." And Linda Brent, head of Chimp Haven, said of the move, "First and foremost, it's exciting for these chimpanzees."

The sanctuary is set in 200 acres in Keithville and is currently home to about 130 chimps that live in more natural surroundings and social conditions than those available at research institutes.

The move is one consequence of an N.I.H. decision to move away from supporting biomedical research on chimpanzees. A year ago Dr. Francis S. Collins, the agency's director, announced that it would suspend all new grants for biomedical and behavioral research on chimps that it owns or for which it is responsible. It also accepted guidelines that will allow the use of agency chimps in research only if the studies are necessary for human health, and cannot be done any other way. A further report, on how to put these guidelines into effect, is to be issued by a working group on Jan. 22.

With the move of the New Iberia chimps, the total number of chimps in research facilities, some owned by universities or private companies, will be down to about 800, Mr. Pacelle said. Of those, the N.I.H. owns nearly 300.

In September, the New Iberia Research Center, which has more than 200 chimps of its own, had chosen not to renew its application for money to house and maintain the N.I.H. chimps, so the agency decided to retire them, and in early December announced that the animals would be moved: between 10 and 20 to Chimp Haven and the rest to the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio.

But the Humane Society and Chimp Haven had hoped to move the chimpanzees directly to a sanctuary, and they began discussions with the agency. Chimp Haven told the N.I.H. that it could take about half of the chimps in existing facilities. With $2.3 million more in financing it could finish work on additional housing and enclosures and take all the chimps.

But the N.I.H. did not have $2.3 million to contribute. Furthermore, it is nearing a cumulative cap of $30 million on support for the sanctuary, set in the law that created it.

No such limit exists for support of chimps in the research population, and the result of this difference is that as research is being phased out and chimps are moving to sanctuaries, the money to support them is rapidly disappearing. The cap will probably be reached this fiscal year, according to Kathy Hudson, deputy director of science, outreach and policy at the agency.

"The total dollars that we need to spend to support our chimpanzees will remain steady or perhaps even drop," Dr. Hudson said in a conference call with reporters about the transfer of the New Iberia chimps. But since money for research chimps and money for sanctuary chimps comes from two different pots, she said, "we need a lifting of that cap."

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Chicken Farms Try Oregano as Antibiotic Substitute

Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

Chickens raised for Bell & Evans, like these in Pennsylvania, eat feed laced with oregano oil.

FREDERICKSBURG, Pa. — The smell of oregano wafting from Scott Sechler's office is so strong that anyone visiting Bell & Evans these days could be forgiven for wondering whether Mr. Sechler has forsaken the production of chicken and gone into pizza.

Oregano lies loose in trays and tied into bunches on tabletops and counters, and a big, blue drum that held oregano oil stands in the corner. "Have you ever tried oregano tea?" Mr. Sechler asked, mashing leaves between his broad fingers.

Off and on over the last three years or so, his chickens have been eating a specially milled diet laced with oregano oil and a touch of cinnamon. Mr. Sechler swears by the concoction as a way to fight off bacterial diseases that plague meat and poultry producers without resorting to antibiotics, which some experts say can be detrimental to the humans who eat the meat. Products at Bell & Evans, based in this town about 30 miles east of Harrisburg, have long been free of antibiotics, contributing to the company's financial success as consumers have demanded purer foods.

But Mr. Sechler said that nothing he had used as a substitute in the past worked as well as oregano oil.

"I have worried a bit about how I'm going to sound talking about this," he said. "But I really do think we're on to something here."

Skeptics of herbal medicines abound, as any quick Internet search demonstrates. "Oil of oregano is a perennial one, advertised as a cure for just about everything," said Scott Gavura, a pharmacist in Toronto who writes for the Web site Science-Based Medicine. "But there isn't any evidence, there are too many unanswered questions and the only proponents for it are the ones producing it."

Nonetheless, Mr. Gavura said he would welcome a reduction in the use of antibiotics in animals.

At the same time, consumers are growing increasingly sophisticated about the content of the foods that they eat.

Data on sales of antibiotic-free meat is hard to come by, but the sales are a tiny fraction of the overall meat market. Sales in the United States of organic meat, poultry and fish, which by law must be raised without antibiotics, totaled $538 million in 2011, according to the Organic Trade Association. By comparison, sales of all beef that year were $79 billion.

Still, retailers like Costco, Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, as well as some restaurant chains, complain that they cannot get enough antibiotic-free meat.

Noodles & Company, a fast-growing chain of more than 300 restaurants, recently added antibiotic-free pork to the choices of ingredients that customers can add to their made-to-order pastas. It ensured its supply by ordering cuts of meat that were not in relatively high demand and by committing in advance to buy a year's worth, said Dan Fogarty, its executive vice president for marketing.

"We're deliberately voting with our pocketbooks," he said.

In a nationwide telephone survey of 1,000 adults in March, more than 60 percent told the Consumer Reports National Research Center that they would be willing to pay at least 5 cents a pound more for meat raised without antibiotics.

"Before, it was kind of a nice little business, and while it's still microscopic in the grand scheme of things, we're seeing acceptance from retailers across the country, not just in California and on the East Coast," said Stephen McDonnell, founder and chief executive of Applegate, an organic and natural meats company.

Mr. McDonnell said a confluence of trends, from heightened interest in whole and natural foods to growing concerns about medical problems like diabetes, obesity and gluten allergies, were contributing to the demand for antibiotic-free meat.

There is growing concern among health care experts and policy makers about antibiotic resistance and the rise of "superbugs," bacteria that are impervious to one or more antibiotics. Those bacteria can be passed on to consumers, who eat meat infected with them and then cannot be treated.

In November, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 25 national health organizations and advocacy groups issued a statement on antibiotics that, among other things, called for "limiting the use of medically important human antibiotics in food animals" and "supporting the use of such antibiotics in animals only for those uses that are considered necessary for assuring animal health."

In 2011, there were several prominent recalls involving bacterial strains that are resistant to antibiotics, including more than 60 million pounds of ground beef contaminated with salmonella Typhimurium and about 36 million pounds of ground turkey spoiled with salmonella Heidelberg.

Consumer Reports released a study last month that found the bacteria Yersinia enterocolitica in 69 percent of 198 pork chop and ground pork samples bought at stores around the country. Some of the bacteria were resistant to one or more antibiotics.

Analysis of Food and Drug Administration data by the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States are used in animals. The majority of those antibiotics are used to spur growth or prevent infections from spreading in the crowded conditions in which most animal production takes place today.

The European Union has banned the use of antibiotics to accelerate growth, and the European Parliament is pushing to end their use as tools to prevent disease as well.

The oregano oil product Mr. Sechler uses, By-O-Reg Plus, is made by a Dutch company, Ropapharm International. In the late 1990s, Bayer conducted trials on the product, known as Ropadiar in Europe, comparing its ability to control diarrhea in piglets caused by E. coli with that of four of the company's products.

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