Medicine & Health

New research by Herbert W. “Skip” Virgin, MD, PhD, and colleagues may explain why advanced AIDS patients often develop gastrointestinal disease.

Helen E. Nash, MD, professor emerita (clinical) in pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, died Oct. 4, 2012, at Clermont Manor in Creve Coeur. She was 91.

A molecule involved in asthma and allergies has now been shown to make mice resistant to skin cancer, according to Raphael Kopan, PhD, and his colleagues at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Scanning the DNA of two people with a rare disease has led scientists to identify the precise genetic error responsible for their disorder, which causes persistent lung, sinus and ear infections, male infertility, and sometimes a reversed orientation of major organs in the body. The defect affects hair-like structures called cilia that extend from many cells in the body.

Wayne M. Yokoyama, MD, and Charles F. Zorumski, MD, have been elected to the Institute of Medicine, a part of the National Academy of Sciences. Membership in the organization is one of the highest honors physician-scientists in the U.S. can receive.​

Andrew Yoo, Robert Gereau and Michael Bruchas have been awarded grants from the National Institues of Health Common Fund to pursue visionary research that has the potential to transform science and improve human health.

Brian K. Kobilka, MD, a former medical resident at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine, is the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

William G. Powderly, MD, will lead global health initiatives as a newly appointed deputy director of Washington University’s Institute of Public Health. He also will serve as co-director of the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine at the university’s School of Medicine. ​

Andrew and Barbara Taylor and the Crawford Taylor Foundation, the charity of the entire Jack C. Taylor family, have committed $20 million to the Department of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine to advance the science underlying the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illnesses. The gift creates the new Taylor Family Institute for Innovative Psychiatric Research.

Providing birth control to women at no cost substantially reduced unplanned pregnancies and cut abortion rates by 62 percent to 77 percent over the national rate, a new study shows.