Valley News – Descendants of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, have created a $25,000 scholarship at the Geisel School of Medicine to honor and give thanks for a pioneering surgery that Dartmouth’s Dr. Nathan Smith performed on Joseph Smith two centuries ago.

The New York Times – Ira Byock, professor of medicine and community and family medicine emeritus, participates in The New York Times’ opinion section “Room for Debate,” discussing how some nations are permitting people with serious, nonfatal health problems—even severe depression—to commit suicide with help from a physician.

NHPR – As a guest on NHPR’s “The Exchange,” Susanne Tanski, associate professor of pediatrics, discusses recent research that raises questions about the rising use of e-cigarrettes by teenagers despite claims that they are healthier than traditional smoking.

Esquire – Continued coverage on the recent study conducted by Dartmouth and the University of Pittsburgh, which found that young people who try e-cigarettes are much more likely to start smoking. The researchers evaluated 694 people between the ages of 16 and 26 who had never previously smoked cigarettes. Additionally, all participants—54 percent of whom were female, and 76 percent of whom were white—were determined to be “attitudinally nonsusceptible” to smoking because they responded “definitely no” when asked if they would try a cigarette offered by a friend or if they would smoke within the next year.

VPR – Continued coverage on comments by Samir Soneji on the study that found young people who use e-cigarettes are very likely to move on to smoking real tobacco products. Soneji speculates that e-cigarettes, which deliver nicotine slowly, tempt novices to try it in a user-friendly form. “So a 17-year old kid who has never used cigarettes before might use e-cigarettes and it might allow him to become more tolerant of the side effects of nicotine using e-cigarettes and then unfortunately if addiction happens he might switch to traditional cigarettes,” says Soneji.

The Washington Post – Quotes Samir Soneji, assistant professor of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, on the new study that reports young people who use e-cigarettes are much more likely to become smokers than those who don’t. Researchers said one limitation of the study was the relatively small number in the sample size and that the findings need to be replicated with larger samples. Even so, after controlling for well-known risk factors, such as age, sex, socioeconomic status and risk-taking, “we think the effect is real,” says Soneji.

U.S. News & World Report via HealthDay News – Quotes James Sargent, professor of pediatrics and community and family medicine, and senior author of a new study that reports young people who use e-cigarettes are much more likely to become smokers than those who don’t. “The real concern is that if it does indeed move these adolescents in the direction of smoking cigarettes, it’s going to turn around the two-decade-long decline in teen smoking that we’ve seen,” says Sargent. “The government needs to get off the pot on this. They need to act.”

Yahoo News via Reuters – Quotes Dustin Lee, postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry, on a recent study which found that nearly one in five high school students in Connecticut who said they used electronic cigarettes to vaporize nicotine also used them to vaporize marijuana. “We know very little about the acute and long-term effects of high-potency THC on neurobiology and behavior,” says Lee, who was not involved in the study. “This is especially concerning for teens, who are in a critical time for development of brain structures that are integral in executive functioning.”

Payson Roundup – An article on research conducted by Lisa Jackson, Geisel ’14, which found that teens attending Payson High School (PHS) in Payson, Ariz., engage in substantially more high-risk behaviors than the national average — and suffer a much higher rate of teen pregnancies.

Valley News – Sandra Wong, the William W. Coon Professor of Surgical Oncology and associate chairwoman of clinical affairs at the University of Michigan Health System, has been named chairwoman of surgery and senior vice president of the surgical service line at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and chairwoman of surgery at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Her term begins Oct. 26.