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Show DAILY HERALD Thursday, September 9, 2004 Genesis Continued from Al wasn't supposed to happen. We're going to have a lot of work picking up the pieces." supposed to happen. We're ing to have a kit of work picking up the pieces." A recovery team that includes Genesis project members was dispatched to the crash site Wednesday afternoon on a salvage mission. Hollywood stunt pilots had taken off in helicopters to hook the parachute, but the refrigerator-sized capsule holding a set of fragile disks containing billions of atoms collected from solar wind hit the desert floor without the parachute opening. The capsule was returning after more than three years in space as part of r project that cost $260 million. The impact drove the capsule halfway underground. NASA engineers feared the explosive for the parachute might still be alive and ready to fire, keeping helicopter crews at bay. "That presents a safety hazard to recovery crews," said Chris Jones, solar system exploration director for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory The copters were supposed to snatch the capsule's para-- . chute with a hook as it floated down at 400 feet a minute, or more than 6 feet per second But the capsule tumbled out of control. It was supposed to be physicist Roger Wiens Los Alamos National Laboratory spinning at 15 revolutions a minute to slice evenly through the atmosphere, but camera images showed it tumbling instead. . Wiens said the capsule held five silicone plates alternatively lined with gold, sapphire and diamond that would have shattered. But he said the thickness of each plate was different, allowing scientists to identify each and put pieces back together like a puzzle. Scientists hoped the capsule's charged atoms a "bilwould lion billion" of them reveal clues about the origin and evolution of our solar system, said Don Burnett, Genesis principal investigator and a nuclear geochemist at California Institute of Technology. "We have for years wanted to know the composition of the sun," Burnett said before the crash. He said scientists had expected to analyze the material "one atom at a time." six-yea- Antibiotic Genesis had been moving in tandem with Earth outside its magnetic shield on three orbits of the sun. Cliff Fleming, the lead helicopter pilot, and backup pilot Dan Rudert had replicated the retrieval in dozens of practice runs. Fleming and Rudert, stunt pilots by trade, were drafted for the mission because of their expertise flying high and capturing objects. Fleming has swooped after sky surfers in the action movie "XXX" and towed actor Pierce Brosnan through the air in "Dante's Peak." He just worked on "Batman 4." The Genesis mission, launched in 2001, marked the first time NASA has collected any objects from farther than the moon for retrieval to Earth, said Roy Haggard, Genesis' flight operations chief and CEO of Vertigo Inc., which designed the capture system Together, the charged atoms captured over 884 days on the capsule's disks of gold, sapphire, diamond and silicone were no bigger than a few grains of salt, but scientists say that would be enough to reconstruct the chemical origin of the sun and its family of "There was a big pit in my stomach. This just Continued from Al England Journal of Medicine, was the first to systematically document the risk. It focused on much more cornmonly used erythromycin pills usually sold as a generic along with certain medicines for infections and calcium channel blockers for high blood pressure. Ray said the danger seems to come from other drugs slowing the breakdown of erythromycin, which increases its concentration. At high levels it traps salt inside resting heart muscle cells, prolonging the time until the next heartbeat starts, and sometimes triggering an abnormal, potentially fatal, rhythm. The findings show doctors should choose an alternative antibiotic, Ray said, at least when prescribing the drugs that interact. Amoxicillin, another popular antibiotic, showed no cardiac risk. There are other antibiotics that provide the same antimicrobial activity without building up in the blood the way erythromycin does," Ray said: Ray's team of doctors and nurses spent years studying detailed medical records of 4,404 Medicaid patients from Tennessee who apparently died of cardiac arrest from 1988-9The team confirmed 1,476 cases of cardiac arrest, then studied Medicaid's records of each pa planets. Scientists had expected to study the material for five more years. . the Net www.genesismission.org. On - A3 tient's medication use. Only a small number of patients had taken both erythromycin and any of the antibiotics or heart drugs carrying a risk. Still, three of them died. Statistically, it was extremely unlikely those deaths were due to chance, according to Ray and other experts. The deaths were in patients taking verapamil or diltiazem, both blood pressure drugs sold as generics and also under various brand names: Verelan and Isoptin for verapamil, Cardizem and Tiazac for diltiazem. Other drugs posing a risk with erythromycin, Ray said, include the antibiotic clarithromycin, sold under the brand; fluconazole, or Diflucan, for vaginal yeast infections; and the antifungal drugs ketoconazole (Nizoral) and itraconazole (Sporanox). Pills and injections of the drugs, but not topical forms, carry the risk. "People may be taking these medications for years, and they develop a throat infection and someone gives them erythromycin, and that's it," Saric rate, and thus can worsen abnormal rhythms, said American Heart Association spokeswoman Dr. Nieca Goldberg. The findings show why people should keep a list of medications they take and share them with all their doctors, said Goldberg, chief of women's cardiac care at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. About 340,000 Americans die each year of cardiac arrest, also called sudden cardiac death, according to the heart association. The condition is caused by abnormal heart rhythm, usually when the heart begins beating too rapidly or too chaotically to eff icientry pump blood. Goldberg noted the nonsedating allergy drug Seldane was taken off the market, in 1998, after reports linking it to sudden cardiac death due to the same types of abnormal heart rhythms. The study was funded by the Food and Drug Administration, two other federal health agencies and the drug company Janssen Pharmaceutica, which makes Nizoral and Sporanox. Ray and two other researchers have received consulting fees from other pharmaceutical or health products companies. in er said. The AIDS drugs called pro- tease inhibitors and grapefruit juice also should be avoided, Ray said, because they, too, can boost blood levels of erythromycin. Erythromycin, in turn, boosts blood levels of verapamil and diltiazem, which slow heart On the Net: www.nejm.org American Heart Association site on sudden cardiac death: httpjfwww. americanheart.or gpresenter.jhtml?identifierl4 mmsm MI 15 UUru daws nasi LzLlzio XL. GET AH EARLY STAtlT! FREE $10 ,1 4 HOURS I GETy OIILY! 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