Newsroom Stories

Rebecca Dresser, JD, the Daniel Noyes Kirby Professor of Law and professor of ethics in medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, has been appointed to the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee of the National Institutes of Health. The committee serves a critical role in the oversight of federally funded research involving recombinant DNA.  

Olin Business School has announced the appointment of Paula Crews as associate dean and director of marketing and communications for the undergraduate and graduate business school at Washington University in St. Louis.

A clinical warning system undergoing a feasibility study at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis will include wireless sensors that take blood oxygenation and heart-rate readings from at-risk patients once or twice a minute. The data  and lab results in the electronic medical record will be continually scrutinized by a machine-learning algorithm looking for signs of clinical deterioration. If any such signs are found, the system will call a nurse on a cellphone, alerting the nurse to check on the patient.

Nearly 390 physicians at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have been named to The Best Doctors In America for 2011.

The recent Budweiser can redesign probably won’t do much to reinvigorate sagging sales of the iconic brew, say marketing professors at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis.

Estate planning with Fido in mind? Better be careful, says a trusts and estates expert at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. The issue has been in the news recently. British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who died in February 2010, left a sizeable sum of money to his beloved dogs; Trouble, the recently deceased dog of “The Queen of Mean,” Leona Helmsley, famously inherited $12 million. Beyond celebrities, a powerful pet inheritance constituency thrives. Between 12 percent and 27 percent of owners have provisions for their pets in their wills. But what happens to the inheritance when the pet passes?

Washington University, two administrators and a School of Medicine department have received safety awards from the Campus Safety Health and Environmental Management Association (CSHEMA) and the National Safety Council. WUSTL was recognized with CSHEMA’s 2011 Complete Safety Program Award of Merit for excellence in the university’s institutional safety and compliance programs.

Two recent research studies have found differences between the distribution of potassium-ion-channel variants in the mouse heart and in the human heart. In the mouse, the ion channels in the atria are different from those in the ventricles. In people there is no such chamber specificity. The difference is crucially important for the development of safe and effective cardiovascular drugs.

A traveling exhibition from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum called “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” highlights how physicians, geneticists, anthropologists and others in the healing professions developed and participated in the Holocaust. The exhibit opens Monday, Aug. 8, at the Bernard Becker Medical Library at Washington University School of Medicine and will be on display until Sunday, Oct. 30.

Worldwide, people aged 60 and above will comprise 13.6 percent of the population by 2020, and 22.1 percent of the population by 2050. China is the most rapidly aging country with older adults making up 13 percent of their population. “All countries will need to develop policies and programs that support productive engagement during later life,” says Nancy Morrow-Howell, PhD, the Ralph and Muriel Pumphrey Professor of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. “There is evidence that productive engagement in later life benefits both older adults and society at large. Expanding opportunities for productive engagement may increase the health and well-being of the older population. At the same time, older adults can be a valuable resource for growth in volunteering, civic service, caregiving, employment, and social entrepreneurship.”