Newsroom Stories

DanforthFormer United States Senator John C. Danforth is a partner with the law firm of Bryan Cave LLP. Danforth represented the state of Missouri in the United States Senate for 18 years. Prior to his retirement from the Senate at the end of 1994, Danforth served on three key committees: the Committee on Finance; Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation; and the Select Committee on Intelligence. His major legislative initiatives were in the areas of international trade, telecommunications, health care, research & development, transportation and civil rights.

McdonnellJohn F. McDonnell retired as chairman of the board for McDonnell Douglas Corporation in 1997 after a more than 35-year career at the company. He was elected chairman and chief executive officer in 1988, a position he held until September 1994. From then until his retirement at the time of the merger with Boeing, he was chairman of the board. McDonnell led the company successfully through the early 1990’s when the U.S. defense budget and the aerospace markets were shrinking dramatically. In the face of a rapidly consolidating aerospace industry, he oversaw the merger of McDonnell Douglas with Boeing to create the world’s largest, broadest, and strongest aerospace company.

WertschJames V. Wertsch is Marshall S. Snow Professor in Arts and Sciences and the director of international and area studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He also holds the position of professor in the Department of Anthropology at the university. Wertsch’s research is concerned with language, thought, and culture. For the past several years, he has focused on collective memory and identity in countries such as Russia and Ukraine, and he is now examining these topics in the Republic of Georgia.

A drug potentially able to prevent breast cancer in high-risk women is the subject of a new clinical study at the School of Medicine. The drug, called exemestane, belongs to a new class of breast-cancer drugs called aromatase inhibitors.

Courtesy photoMichael MartoneAcclaimed fiction writer and essayist Michael Martone, the visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Washington University’s Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, will read from his work at 8 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 27. In addition, Martone will speak on coincidence and fate in fiction in a lecture entitled “Homer on Homer or a Bunch of Stuff That Happens” at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 3.

An international team of researchers has partially untangled the genetic details of a mysterious disorder that formerly caused seizures and death in infant boys within a month of birth.

Richard Burkhardt will examine the scientific, social and political aspects in the development of ethology as a modern science in his Thomas Hall Lecture at 4 p.m. on October 25. He teaches history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and specializes in the history of evolutionary theory and ethology, which is the study of animal behavior by means of comparative zoological methods.

A study of patients who have difficulty paying attention to the left side of their environment has provided some of the first direct evidence that brain injury can cause detrimental functional changes in brain regions far from the site of the actual injury.

Nobel Laureate Kenneth J. Arrow will discuss “The Economics of New Antimalarial Drugs” at 2:30 p.m. Oct. 21 in the Bryan Cave Courtroom, Anheuser-Busch Hall. Arrow, a longtime professor of economics at Stanford University, recently chaired a National Institute of Medicine committee that issued a report titled “Saving Lives, Buying Time: Economics of Malaria Drugs in an Age of Resistance.” Malaria, along with tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, is one of the big three global killers of the world’s poorest people.