Newsroom Stories

Courtesy PhotoUniversity physical therapy students worked with St. Louis seniors to help them prepare for the Mature Mile.

EckmannSabine Eckmann, Ph.D., will become director of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis effective July 1, 2005, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton announced today. Eckmann joined the Kemper Art Museum as curator in fall 1999 and also regularly teaches seminars in the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences. She succeeds Mark S. Weil, Ph.D., the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts, who has led the museum since 1998. Weil, a longtime faculty member in art history, will retire June 30.

Genes respond to chemo drugOncologists aren’t sure exactly why patients with the same cancer often respond very differently to the same treatment, but a growing body of evidence suggests the answer lies somewhere in the genes. Now researchers at the School of Medicine have become the first to profile the activity of whole sets of genes involved in processing chemotherapeutic drugs.

Male Bahamas mosquitofish (left) chasing a female (right).A biologist at Washington University in St. Louis has shown that for some fish species, females prefer males with larger sexual organs, and actually choose them for mating. That does not exclude males with an average-sized sex organ, called a gonopodium. These fish out-compete the larger-endowed males in a predator-laden environment because they have a faster burst speed than the males with larger genitalia, thus avoiding predators and staying in the mating game.

The Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences has announced winners for the 2005 A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition. Four student plays were selected in two categories. Full-length winners were Highness, by junior Carolyn Kras, and Shades of Light Blue, by junior Yuan Ji. Flick, by freshman Nicholas A. Loyal, and Chosen Family, by freshman Nick Rogers, won for short plays.

The urban legends about managed care convey a sense that managed care often leads to early death. However, the business methods employed by managed care frequently result in reduced cost for the companies and the individuals enrolled in the programs. Because of the potential savings, the trend has been to encourage Medicare enrollees to use managed care programs. A recent study by a professor in the business school Washington University in St. Louis and a colleague suggests that it’s not managed care that increases mortality; it’s lack of drug coverage. The study suggests that a one percent increase in the number of people enrolled in Medicare Managed Care without drug coverage would result in an additional 5,100 deaths among the elderly population of the United States in one year.

It’s been two years since New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer’s crackdown on the securities industry spawned the “Global Analyst Research Settlement.” Spitzer targeted analysts and bankers from the same company for getting a little too cozy with each other. Recently, two professors from Washington University in St. Louis’s Olin School of Business released a report indicating that the Global Settlement is successfully eliminating the apparent conflict of interest.

As our brains mature, the red regions are used more frequently, and the blue areas are used less.Children activate different and more regions of their brains than adults when they perform word tasks, according to investigators at the School of Medicine. Reporting in the journal Cerebral Cortex, the researchers say those changes in regional brain activity from childhood to adulthood may reflect the more efficient use of our brains as we mature.

Drawing by an autistic childA research team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has identified regions of DNA that may be related to risk for autism. The researchers are learning how autism is inherited, and to identify genetic factors, they’re studying families and looking for traits that normally aren’t considered autistic but have connections to autism risk. Several studies have demonstrated that autism has a strong genetic component. If one child in a family is autistic, there’s about a 10 percent chance that a sibling also will have autism.

A look at the activity of 24 genes in 52 patients as those genes respond to the chemotherapy drug 5-fluorourancilOncologists aren’t sure exactly why patients with the same cancer often respond very differently to the same treatment, but a growing body of evidence suggests the answer lies somewhere in the genes. Now researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have become the first to profile the activity of whole sets of genes involved in processing chemotherapeutic drugs.