I must admit, I was a little surprised to see this one on Yahoo!.  A doctor in Detroit who previously conducted animal research at UCLA has started using a scanning device on human infants that was designed for small animals.  The technology is called micro positron emissions tomography (PET), and the claim is that the device can help detect brain disease in infants.  This may be a great advance in medicine, but I hope we are not going to find out 10 years later that this gizmo shoots out too many emissions for an infant brain to handle.  After all, here is how the idea was generated, in a quote from the physician:  “I said to myself, ‘A monkey is about the same size as a newborn, why don’t I stick one of these machines in the nursery?’”

Like I said, this may be the next great thing in medicine, and I’m sure a lot of disease will be detected early, and possibly dealt with in more appropriate ways, but as a parent, I’d have a whole lot of questions.  Read on if you do too.

Maybe I’m being too harsh on this one.  I personify the psycho protective parent - after all, when our kids were babies, I freaked out if they coughed wrong.  And when one of our babies had to go to the hospital, I was monitoring the IV medications right along with the nurse.  So, if anyone told me they wanted to scan my baby with a machine that is also used on small animals, I would have lot of questions.  After all, the final quote in the article is “...pay attention....”