Newsroom Stories

Charter schools are attended disproportionately by poor, minority students.Since their creation in the early 1990s, charter schools have come under fire from many civil rights supporters. “Traditional advocates of civil rights claim that charter schools are but another opportunity for whites to escape from the public school system and gain advantage for their children at taxpayers’ expense,” says Tomiko Brown-Nagin, associate professor of law and of history at Washington University in St. Louis. “This criticism overlooks the astounding fact, however, that most charter schools have been established in poor, minority neighborhoods and are attended disproportionately by poor, minority students — those whose schools and neighborhoods have been untouched by Brown v. Board of Education.”

Photo courtesy of Alzheimer’s Association, St. Louis ChapterA WUSTL psychologist says there is little consensus among doctors when it comes to disclosing a dementia diagnosis to patients and their caregivers.To tell or not to tell, that is the question. Should Alzheimer’s disease patients be told of the diagnosis? If so, when, how and by whom? Brian D. Carpenter, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, conducted a review of related study literature that shows there is little consensus among clinicians on the issue of disclosing a dementia diagnosis and great room for much more research. Carpenter’s review, done with research assistant Jennifer Dave, was published in the April 2004 issue of The Gerontologist. “If contemporary debate and practice are any indication, there is no consensus on these matters,” Carpenter says in the article “Disclosing a Dementia Diagnosis: A Review of Opinion and Practice, and a Proposed Research Agenda.”

That’s using your brain. For the first time in humans, a team headed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis has placed an electronic grid atop patients’ brains to gather motor signals that enable patients to play a computer game using only the signals from their brains.

WUSTL researchers have found no convincing evidence that people can delay or hasten their own deaths through sheer will.Many of us know stories about terminally ill friends or relatives who were able to battle their illnesses in order to survive until a birthday or other important occasion. In much of medicine, it’s an accepted “truth” that people can hang on or give up and somehow influence the timing of their own deaths. But in reviewing every study on the subject of delaying death, Washington University behavioral medicine researchers have found that there’s no evidence to support the idea that terminally ill people can have an effect on when they die.

In this micrograph of a neuron, green dye highlights proteins linked to nerve cell damage and death during stroke.Brain cells in danger of exciting other nearby brain cells to death may be able to close temporarily, according to new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Scientists simulated stroke-like conditions in cultured rat brain cells that use glutamate, an excitatory chemical messenger linked to nerve damage and death during strokes. But when they created those conditions, the researchers found that glutamate transmission was suppressed in what may be an attempt by neurons to limit the damage caused by catastrophic events such as strokes.

GrigsbyDoctors regularly use positron emission tomography (PET) scans to diagnose cervical cancer, taking advantage of the technique’s ability to highlight metabolic differences in cancerous tissues. But PET is rarely used for follow-up assessment of cervical cancer patients after treatment. A study in the June 1 issue of Journal of Clinical Oncology shows that post-treatment PET scans could help physicians better predict which patients are largely cancer-free as a result of their treatment and which patients may soon be likely to need additional treatment.

Are humans inherently good? The prevailing view in popular and scientific literature is that humans and animals are genetically driven to compete for survival, thus making all social interaction inherently selfish. According to this line of reasoning, known as sociobiology, even seemingly unselfish acts of altruism merely represent a species’ strategy to survive and preserve its genes. But Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., a professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that this is a narrow and simplistic view of evolutionary theory that fails to explain many aspects of sociality among mammals in general and primates in particular. In “The Origins and Nature of Sociality,” a new book Sussman co-edited, he and other researchers challenge the proponents of sociobiology. “The ‘selfish gene’ hypothesis is inadequate,” Sussman says.

A conference for board directors of public and private companies will be held June 25-26 at Washington University’s John M. Olin School of Business in the school’s Charles F. Knight Executive Education Center. The board of directors’ conference, “Strategies and Techniques for Improving Board Performance,” will focus on corporate governance issues.

Joyce and Howard Wood, both alumni of the John M. Olin School of Business, have created the Joyce and Howard Wood Distinguished Professorship in Business. Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton announced the gift of $1.7 million, which has been augmented with $300,000 from the University’s Sesquicentennial Endowed Professorship Challenge. William P. Bottom, Ph.D., will be formally installed as the first holder of this professorship at a later date.

NorthDouglass C. North, Ph.D., the Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts & Sciences and a co-recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, joined a panel of distinguished economists in Denmark May 24-28th for an intensive forum exploring the costs and benefits of ongoing efforts to address critical global challenges, such as war, famine and disease.