Medicine & Health

Innovative researcher George Whitesides will speak on revolutionary ideas in chemistry that may lead to a new understanding of the origin of life for the Ferguson Science Lecture at 11 a.m. on Wed., Feb. 6 in Graham Chapel as part of the Assembly Series.

Washington University and the pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc. will collaborate more closely under a new $25 million, five-year biomedical research agreement that has the potential to move discoveries from the laboratory bench to patients’ bedsides more quickly. The collaboration represents a new model of partnership between academia and industry.

A review of epidemiological data has found evidence that people who spend fewer years in school may experience a slight but statistically significant delay in the realization that they’re having cognitive problems that could be Alzheimer’s disease.

Leon Kass has been at the forefront of bioethics since before Louise Brown, the first test tube baby, was born in 1978. His talk for the Assembly Series, “Brave New Biology: The Challenge for Bioethics” will be presented at 4 p.m. Wednesday, February 6 in Graham Chapel on Washington University’s Danforth Campus. The program is free and open to the public

The School of Medicine will play a leading role in an international collaboration to sequence the genomes of 1,000 individuals. The ambitious 1000 Genomes Project will create the most detailed picture to date of human genetic variation and likely will identify many genetic factors underlying common diseases.

The School of Medicine is pleased by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision released today. The Court let stand a unanimous 2007 ruling by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that stated prostate tissue and serum samples donated to Washington University can continue to be used by the institution for cancer research. The appellate court had affirmed the lower federal district court ruling that donors who gave tissue or serum samples to the University for research can’t later compel the school to transfer ownership of the samples to another research institution.

Innovative researcher and distinguished professor George M. Whitesides, Ph.D., will speak on revolutionary ideas in the field of chemistry about the origin of life at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 6, in Graham Chapel as part of the Assembly Series. His talk, “Questions about Questions about the Origin of Life,” is the annual Ferguson Science Lecture […]

Looking back over the recent past, the advances in biomedicine seem astonishing. The birth of the first “test tube baby” 30 years ago, for example, was viewed as exotic and, to some, scary. Now, in vitro fertilization is commonplace. And yet, justifiable ethical concerns surround the human outcomes of these medical breakthroughs. Leon Kass, M.D., […]

Increasing levels of a protein that helps the brain use cholesterol may slow the development of Alzheimer’s disease changes in the brain, according to researchers studying a mouse model of the disease at the School of Medicine.

John Lasala and Ralph Damiano Jr. work together on the first surgery in the PARTNER trial. A 78-year-old St. Louis woman was the first patient in this region to receive an experimental device to replace her defective aortic valve without opening the chest wall or using a heart-lung machine. This procedure was performed by Washington University heart specialists at Barnes-Jewish Hospital on Jan. 15.