Newsroom Stories

Listed below are this month’s featured news stories. • Flu vaccine (week of Nov. 3) • Cutting calories doesn’t help memory (week of Nov. 10) • Great American Smokeout (week of Nov. 17) • Gut microbes control fat cells (week of Nov. 24)

Photo by Dawn Majors, St. Louis Post-DispatchRoger Beck gets a kiss from his son Denton.Roger Beck cried for the first time in 22 years thanks to Randal Paniello, associate professor of otolaryngology. Paniello performed the first saliva gland transplant in the United States to restore Beck’s ability to produce tears. Learn more about the procedure in this St. Louis Post-Dispatch feature.

From helping start-up companies grow into strong businesses to guiding inventors as they obtain patents, students in the Washington University School of Law’s new Intellectual Property and Business Formation Legal Clinic, working under the supervision of experienced intellectual property law attorneys, will offer a variety of services to the University and St. Louis community.

DealDavid Deal, J.D., recently joined the Washington University School of Law as the administrative director of the Intellectual Property and Business Formation Clinic and as the acting associate director of the Center for Research on Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

Yet another disease has been linked to obesity. Samuel Klein, director of the WUSM Center for Human Nutrition, reports fatty liver disease, usually associated with excess alcohol consumption, is on the rise among those who don’t drink too much. One common factor linked to the increase is obesity. Read more in the following Post-Dispatch article.

Courtesy photoJohn DaltonFiction writer and St. Louis native John Dalton will open Washington University’s Writing Program Spring Reading Series at 8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 27. Dalton is the author of Heaven Lake. His short fiction has appeared in Story, Alaska Quarterly Review and other journals.

WUSTL Photo Services*The Trojan Women*Widely considered the greatest anti-war play ever written, Euripides’ The Trojan Women (415 B.C.) remains both timeless and timely, a poignant meditation on the aftermath of battle. Ron Himes — the Henry E. Hampton Jr. artist-in-residence at Washington University as well as founder and producing director of the St. Louis Black Repertory — will direct a new production of Euripides’ enduring parable for the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences Jan. 28-30 and Feb. 4-6.

The Washington University Center for the Study of Ethics & Human Values will sponsor a symposium on tort reform and medical malpractice from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Jan. 22 in Whitaker Hall. The symposium, titled “Medical Malpractice and Tort Reform: Finding Truth and Common Ground,” is free and open to the public.

Washington University’s Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences will present “What is a Child?,” a conversation with University of Iowa education experts Gail Masuchika Boldt and Cynthia Lewis, at 4 p.m. Monday, Jan. 24, in the Ann W. Olin Women’s Building Formal Lounge.

A class of anti-seizure medications slows the rate of aging in roundworms, according to researchers at the School of Medicine. When exposed to drugs used to treat epilepsy in humans, worms lived longer and retained youthful functions longer than normal.