Killer Fat

"I wish I were a rat," Frank Garofolo, a 56-year-old investment banker in Boston, said recently. Garofolo has diabetes, as do his mother, father, and brother; his sister died of it. He had just been told about an experiment at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City in which a plump lab rat lost more than half its intra-abdominal fat when it was exposed to a drug-and-light therapy usually used to kill tumors. A couple of years earlier, Garofolo had submitted to experimental surgery himself at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, during which a surgeon pulled chunks of ivory-colored fat out through small openings in his belly. Although the loss of 4½ pounds of intra-abdominal fat allowed Garofolo to go from a tight size 44 belt to a loose one, it didn't have the effect he so fervently desired—boosting his insulin sensitivity and lessening the severity of his diabetes—leaving him desperate enough to envy a rat.