Newsroom Stories

Influential civil rights expert and Harvard law professor Lani Guinier will deliver the Chancellor’s Fellowship keynote address at 11 am. January 25 in Graham Chapel. Her talk, “Meritocracy INC: How Wealth Became Merit, Class Became Race, and College Education Became a Gift from the Poor to the Rich,” coincides with the commencement of the Assembly Series’ spring installment. A panel discussion will be held at 2 p.m. in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge. Most Assembly Series lectures are held in Graham Chapel at 11 a.m. on Wednesdays, and all lectures are free and open to the public. For a complete schedule and up-to-date information, check the Web site at http://assemblyseries.wustl.edu or call 314-935-5285.

The ideal substance to prevent cancer would block tumor growth without causing unpleasant or dangerous side effects. Researchers at the School of Medicine now report that a compound related to vitamin A shows promise in preventing or slowing tumor growth in mice prone to lung cancer. The compound, called bexarotene, doesn’t cause the severe skin irritations that have limited the use of other vitamin A derivatives in cancer therapies.

Courtesy photoWashington University’s team: Shlomo Goltz, Nathan Heigert and Hubert CheungIn the world of advertising, the hardest thing to do is get people’s attention — a job that becomes exponentially harder as audiences diversify and traditional broadcasters compete with YouTube.com, MySpace.com and other online communities. So, rather than compete, companies are beginning to enlist those communities through what’s becoming known as “consumer-generated advertising.” This fall, a group of students from Washington University in St. Louis was one of five teams to make the finals of the “Chevy Super Bowl College Ad Challenge.” The winning team will be unveiled when its ad runs Feb. 4, during Super Bowl XLI. More…

The Washington University Chamber Orchestra will launch a yearlong celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with a concert at 8 p.m. Monday, Jan. 23. The program will include Mozart’s popular Eine kleine Nachtmusik as well as the less familiar “Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546” and arias from several of his operas.

In 1995, a bus crash outside Kokstad, South Africa, left 12 schoolboys dead. Wild rumors swirled: the crash was caused by witches, the deceased made zombie slaves. In the weeks that followed, mobs executed two elderly women while local sangomas (traditional Xhosa shamans) tried to resurrect the boys. Such is the true story behind Ipi Zombi?, Brett Bailey’s exploration of the South African psyche, presented Jan. 27 to Feb. 5 in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre.

Vegetables are a staple of calorie restriction diets.Eating a very low-calorie yet nutritionally balanced diet is good for your heart. Studying heart function in members of an organization called the Calorie Restriction Society, investigators at the School of Medicine found that their hearts functioned like the hearts of much younger people. The researchers report their findings in the Jan. 17 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

In 2005, physicians in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the School of Medicine saw more than 1,500 cancer patients in their brachytherapy treatment rooms where implanted or injected radiation sources are used to treat cancer. That number was up five-fold from the fairly steady numbers of the late 1970s to the mid 1990s.

Keith Sawyer, Ph.D., associate professor of education and psychology in Arts & Sciences, is one of the country’s leading scientific experts on creativity. His research spans creativity, collaboration, learning and play. His eighth book, Explaining Creativity, was the subject of a recent Time magazine interview.

Physicians have come to understand that what we call breast cancer is really several — probably at least five — different diseases that need different treatments and have different outcomes. Now researchers at the School of Medicine and collaborating institutions in the United States and Canada plan to evaluate these breast cancer subtypes and determine the likely prognosis and most effective treatment for each.

BagenstosThe United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously on January 9 in favor of a Georgia inmate in a disability rights case, United States v. Georgia. Samuel R. Bagenstos, J.D., professor of law, argued the case on behalf of the inmate, Tony Goodman. The ruling paves the wave for Goodman to seek damages against the state of Georgia. According to the ruling, Goodman’s “more serious allegations” were that he was “confined for 23-to-24 hours per day in a 12-by-3-foot cell, in which he could not turn his wheelchair around” and that “the lack of accessible facilities rendered him unable to use the toilet and shower without assistance, which was often denied.”