Newsroom Stories

Small-scale preliminary trials suggested that careful control of blood pressure could possibly delay or even prevent kidney failure in patients with polycystic kidney disease (PKD), which affects more than 600,000 people in the United States.

Embargoed for 9 a.m. (CST), Monday, Feb. 20, 2006 Earthquakes are a common part of life in California. Towns are prepared for major seismic events and most residents consider earthquake safety an important issue. But in the Midwest, people rarely think of the large New Madrid fault zone underneath their feet. According to seismologists, major New Madrid earthquakes are rare, but when one eventually occurs, it can be catastrophic. So how do small towns that line the New Madrid fault zone improve earthquake preparedness when immediate risk and awareness are low and town budgets are stretched? “Unfortunately earthquake safety in the Midwest is event driven — most people will not begin to care about the risk until an earthquake happens,” says David Gillespie, Ph.D., disaster preparedness expert and professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis. “Town leaders need to think long-term – 25 or 50 years out — about incremental improvements in safety measures that can be sustained. This is a different kind of planning, but it is necessary to be ready for the eventual catastrophic quake that will strike.”

Ernst K. Zinner, Ph.D., research professor of physics and of earth and planetary sciences, both in Arts & Sciences, at Washington University in St. Louis, provided an overview of the study of “Stardust in the Laboratory” Monday, Feb. 20, 2006, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), held in St. Louis. He also participated in the AAAS “Exploring a Dusty Cosmos” press briefing that morning.

Washington University has a long tradition of undergraduate participation in research, one developed further by programs created by Sarah Elgin, Ph.D., professor of biology; biochemistry and molecular biophysics; and education in Arts & Sciences with financial support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Biotech innovations pop up every day. From medicines developed by large companies to ingenious solutions worked out by individuals in university labs, new technologies are poised to enter the marketplace. The question is, are patents helping or hurting this process? “Patents are essential to bring biotechnology innovations from everyone — not just well-funded corporations — to the people,” says F. Scott Kieff, J.D., associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “Without patents, the biotech marketplace in basic science takes on the nature of something like an old boys’ club in which personal attributes such as fame, prestige, and even gender and race, govern what exchanges take place; and the addition of patents gives many more people a way to play in that game.”

There is a good story behind science, but no one is telling it in American classrooms. According to Ursula Goodenough, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, science continues to be taught from K-12 to the college and university levels, in fragmented, incoherent bits and pieces rather than a coherent narrative, a history of nature.

While some job openings are advertised, “hidden jobs” account for 75 percent of the job market. Leigh Deusinger, business development specialist; and Arlene Taich, Ph.D., graduate and postdoctoral career development specialist, both in The Career Center at Washington University in St. Louis, talked about power job search strategies to locate the unadvertised positions during a session at the American Association for the Advancement of the Science’s Annual Meeting in St. Louis Feb. 16-20.

An evolutionary and population biologist at Washington University in St. Louis says that Ernst Mayr’s theory of genetic revolution has been illustrated nicely in recent years in human genetic epidemiology and population biology studies. Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D., Washington University professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, said that there is an extensive documentation of genetic interaction over the past few years including his own genetic epidemiology studies of coronary artery disease (CAD).

Growing biopiracy concerns have fueled urgent calls for a new system of legal protection for traditional knowledge. Detractors of the current patent systems say that the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples and local communities does not readily fit into the existing rules of the industrialized world and that these rules basically promote the interests of the industrialized world. However, Charles McManis, J.D., IP and technology law expert and the Thomas and Karole Green Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that “at least in the short run, existing intellectual property regimes offer the most realistic avenue for securing effective legal protection for traditional knowledge holders.”

mp3 fileIn this acuality, Sussman discusses the fact that a human ancestor species called Australopithecus afarensis that lived between 5 million and 2.5 million years ago was what’s called an “edge species”. That is, they could adapt both to living in trees and on the ground. Most primate edge species actually are prey rather than […]