Newsroom Stories

In an effort to foster and encourage productive and proactive dialogue about race within the School of Social Work at Washington University and the St. Louis region, the Society of Black Student Social Workers (SBSSW) will host “Celebrate King Holiday 2006: When Does a Dream Become Reality?” Jan. 16 from 1-4 p.m. in room 100 of Brown Hall. This event is free and open to the public. The celebration will begin with a keynote address by Kristal Brent Zook, Ph.D., an award-winning investigative journalist and author. She will reflect on the past and current status of Black America to determine if there has been real progress in race relations.

The Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences has announced its Spring 2007 Faculty Fellows. The three recipients are: Patrick Burke, Ph.D., assistant professor of music; Gerald Izenberg, Ph.D., professor of history; and Akiko Tsuchiya, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish, all in Arts & Sciences. Each will spend a semester in-residence with the center, researching a new book project while attending a variety of presentations and delivering one formal, public lecture about their work.

DavisKathryn Davis, recently appointed senior fiction writer in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will open the program’s spring reading series at 8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 26, in Hurst Lounge.

The thin, single-cell boundary where a tumor meets normal tissue is the most dangerous part of a cancer according to a new study by scientists at the School of Medicine. The researchers found that tumor cells bordering normal tissue receive signals that tell them to wander away from the tumor, allowing the cancer cells to establish deadly metastatic tumors elsewhere in the body.

Listed below are this month’s featured news stories. • Non-visual functions of the eye (week of Jan. 4) • Calorie restriction dieting (week of Jan. 11) • Alzheimer’s gene (week of Jan. 18) • Genes and side effects (week of Jan. 25)

Alcoholism may be linked to taste.A team of researchers, led by investigators at the School of Medicine, has found that a gene variant for a bitter-taste receptor on the tongue is associated with an increased risk for alcohol dependence. The research team studied DNA samples from 262 families, all of which have at least three alcoholic individuals. Investigators report in the January issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics on the variation in a taste receptor gene on chromosome 7 called TAS2R16.

John Landsverk, Ph.D., has been named senior scholar at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. Edward F. Lawlor, Ph.D., dean of the School of Social Work and the William E. Gordon Professor, recently announced Landsverk’s appointment, effective Jan. 1.

TrinkausTwo Neandertal fossils excavated from Vindija Cave in Croatia in 1998, believed to be the last surviving Neandertals, may be 3,000-4,000 years older than originally thought. An international team of researchers, including Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has redated the two Neandertals from Vindija Cave, the results of which have been published in the Jan. 2-6 early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, issued an announcement encouraging treatment with anticancer drugs via two methods, after surgery, for women with advanced ovarian cancer. The combined methods, which deliver drugs into a vein and directly into the abdomen, extend overall survival for women with advanced ovarian cancer by about a year. The Siteman Cancer Center at the School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital participated in the NCI-supported clinical trial which led to this clinical announcement.

Chances are good that a medication you take is one of several drugs that can be affected by genetic factors, according to researchers at the School of Medicine and the St. Louis College of Pharmacy. They found that 29 percent of patients seen at local primary-care offices had taken at least one of 16 drugs that can cause adverse reactions in genetically susceptible people.