Lab Subjects Act Like Little Pigs

--These little pigs won’t be going to the market--at least not the ham market. Colorado State University has 30 pigs for sale to research labs at $5 a pound and if that sounds high consider this: The biggest ham in the lot wouldn’t make a decent Easter dinner. “You never saw such tiny pigs,” said Linda Panepinto, lab director for the Fort Collins school, who would be amazed if anyone actually ate one of her friends. Panepinto spent the last several years developing what she calls her “micro-pigs” for use as laboratory research animals. Not much larger than a beagle dog, the miniature swine weigh only about 60 pounds each when fully grown. By comparison, someone who goes to market to buy a fat pig would expect the purchase to weigh 600 to 800 pounds. “Some people say they look like a little rhino,” she said. “But they have the disposition of kitty cats. They are laid back, clean and easy to work with. I can put my hand all the way into the mouth of any pig on the place. They are real sweethearts.” Pigs make good research animals, Panepinto said, because of both physical and emotional similarities to humans.

--Patti Davis, President and Mrs. Reagan’s daughter, says she won’t reveal which parts of her new autobiographical novel mirror real life, and which are invented. “I am taking a stand that I’m not going to say what’s true and what’s not,” Davis said in an interview published in Redbook magazine. “I think it’s more interesting for readers if they have to wonder.” The novel, titled “Home Free,” is the Vietnam War-era tale of Robert Canfield, his well-dressed wife, sassy son and headstrong daughter. Canfield is a California governor who becomes President.

--A study that set out to learn the quality of doctors’ handwriting has found, to no one’s surprise, that it’s very bad indeed. Dr. Karen B. White and John F. Beary III of Georgetown University Hospital in Washington screened the handwriting of 50 physicians in patients’ charts. “We conclude that a considerable portion of most handwritten medical records are illegible, which confirms the common but unpublished wisdom on this subject,” they wrote. They found that 16% of the words in the reports were illegible, as were 80% of the doctors’ signatures. Because of the poor penmanship, 42% of the patient reports could not be fully comprehended. “The price we pay for illegibility includes lower quality of care, a waste of professional time, potential legal problems and a waste of resources in duplicating data that are functionally lost because of illegibility,” the doctors wrote in a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine.