Medical School

The two men followed starkly different paths to the witness stand. The 49-year-old was raised in the outer suburbs, graduated from medical school, got married, and had five children. The 23-year-old from Northeast Philadelphia was kicked out of two high schools, attempted suicide, and spent much of the last decade hooked on heroin and prescription drugs. But in tense and emotional testimony to a Common Pleas Court jury Wednesday, both former altar boys described a bond: Each said he was sexually abused by his parish priest, Edward Avery.

The Inquirer is presenting a daily profile of participants in the May 6 Blue Cross Broad Street Run, considered the country's most popular 10-miler, with 40,000 people. See full coverage at www.philly.com/broadstreetrun . Kate Zalesky, 25, was never an athlete. She was the girl in high school who dreaded the annual day in gym when she had to run a timed mile. She was the kid running a 15-minute mile and dying by the end. She was the typical video-game and book nerd.

TRENTON - A dozen or so high-level Democrats and top university officials have been meeting privately in recent weeks to discuss ways of tweaking Gov. Christie's plan to restructure three New Jersey universities so it is more acceptable to opponents. The meetings involve well-known Democratic leaders and at least four members of the Rutgers Board of Governors, whose approval is needed to make the plan happen. Legislative sign-off is also likely necessary for at least parts of the plan, which Christie wants agreement on by July.

A Gloucester County doctor who shot and killed his former colleague at Virtua before committing suicide Wednesday apparently believed the victim was behind his alleged dismissal from the hospital's medical residency program. Authorities said Giocondo "Joe" Navek, 39, shot Payman Houshmandpour, 32, a resident at Virtua, multiple times at 7:30 a.m. as the victim prepared to leave for work from his home at The Club at Main Street in Voorhees. Houshmandpour had just said goodbye to his wife and their 20-month-old infant and was pulling his silver Audi out of a parking space when Navek approached him. Navek, a former Virtua resident, fired through Houshmandpour's car window and was driving away in a silver Nissan when police stopped him about a mile away on Centennial Boulevard, authorities said.

Perhaps best known for the two-wheeled vehicle called the Segway, Dean Kamen has also invented the wearable insulin pump, a home dialysis machine, a high-tech prosthetic arm, and a wheelchair that can climb stairs. He was in Philadelphia last week to foster support for FIRST, the national robotics competition for elementary and high school students, which has a regional contest Thursday through Saturday at Temple University's Liacouras Center. The finals are later this month in St. Louis.

In January 1957, Dr. John B. Flick Jr. cut out of the heart of a 9-year-old girl a bullet that had been lodged there for 17 days. "Doctors said every time her heart beat, the bullet pushed against the wall of the heart," the Evening Bulletin reported. "In time, they said, it would have worn a hole in the muscle. " Thanks to Dr. Flick, the spent bullet became a belated Christmas present for the girl. "He followed up on her a couple of years later, and she was doing fine," Dr. Flick's daughter, Louise, said in an interview.

Laurence Elliot Earley, 81, former chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania medical school, died of cancer Tuesday, March 13, at Beaumont, a retirement community in Bryn Mawr. Dr. Earley joined the medical school faculty in 1977. He chaired the department for 13 years and was also interim chairman of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation from 1987 to 1990. He was senior associate dean for international medical programs for five years in the 1990s, traveling to strengthen Penn's connections with institutions in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

Arthur Caplan, a nationally known medical ethicist, is leaving Philadelphia to head a new medical ethics division at New York University's Langone Medical Center. Caplan, who has worked at the University of Pennsylvania medical school since 1994, said Saturday he would start work July 1 at NYU. He will serve as director of the new Division of Medical Ethics in the Department of Population Health. "I built what I wanted here," said Caplan, who until January was director of the Center for Bioethics at Penn.

It was the sort of encounter between a doctor and patient that, unfortunately, happens all the time. This time, though, the patient was a psychologist's daughter and her experience led to research that is changing medical education. The girl, then 13 years old, and her mother went to a pediatric cardiologist because of heart palpitations. A long wait in the exam room amplified their worry. The doctor finally arrived and, without exchanging a greeting, said the girl needed to wear a heart monitor every day for a month.

AN ENORMOUS book sits on a shelf near my Rutgers-Camden diploma, just a few steps from the closet where my old black-and-red Rutgers wrestling singlet lies stuffed inside a duffel bag. One of my semesters there was spent studying Milton's Paradise Lost , lugging that book around like a slab of granite. I never really gave Milton a chance and never won a wrestling match there, but eventually I forged a love for words and language in those Camden classrooms. Yesterday hundreds of students, faculty and alums gathered inside the Walter K. Gordon Theater, most dressed in Rutgers scarlet, all concerned that their small campus, their paradise near the Ben Franklin Bridge, was being threatened by Gov. Christie and by South Jersey power broker George E. Norcross III. Last week, Christie put his stamp of approval on an advisory committee's proposal to merge the Camden campus of New Brunswick-based Rutgers University into Glassboro-based Rowan University.