Newsroom Stories

In the late 20th century, Chinese authorities enacted sweeping legal reforms, but in recent years, officials have stepped back from these reforms in the face of increasing citizen protests and concerns about social stability. “Horrified by the chaos of the Maoist era, Chinese authorities rebuilt their legal system in the 1980s and 1990s,” says Carl Minzner, JD, leading expert on Chinese law and politics and associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. Now Chinese Party and court authorities have begun to move away from the reform track of the last several decades, reasserting tighter control over the Chinese judiciary, restricting the activities of public interest lawyers, and resurrecting earlier mediation practices.

A husband goes missing. A celebrated writer fights to form words. Two young men embark on a pharmaceutically enhanced museum tour while a shell-shocked veteran wanders the streets. Welcome to Chris Kammerer’s The Stroke Scriptures, winner of Washington University’s biennial A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition, which will receive its world premiere in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre.  

The Washington University Opera Workshop will perform excerpts from five beloved operas at 8 p.m. Friday, April 22, in the 560 Music Center Ballroom. The program will highlight comedy and romance with scenes from works by Gaetano Donizetti, Benjamin Britten, Otto Nicolai and Leo Delibes. 

Two new studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Washington University researchers including Timothy Ley, MD, and Richard Wilson, PhD, highlight the power of sequencing cancer patients’ genomes as a diagnostic tool, helping doctors decide the best course of treatment and researchers identify new cancer susceptibility mutations that can be passed from parent to child.

The Women’s Society honored the legacy of two of the university’s most revered women — Harriet K. Switzer and the late Elizabeth Gray Danforth — at its annual meeting April 13. The society presented the Harriet K. Switzer Leadership Award and the Elizabeth Gray Danforth Scholarship to three exemplary college students at the Women’s Building Formal Lounge.

A mobile application called Course Monkey, which allows students to browse the WUSTL course listings quickly and easily on their iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, now is available at the Apple App Store.

Despite promising findings in the laboratory, Dominic N. Reeds, MD, and other nutrition researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that ginseng does not improve insulin sensitivity in diabetics who are overweight.

WUSTL has received a four-year, $550,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to preserve Henry Hampton’s award-winning civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 as well as Hampton’s complete, unedited interviews recorded on film for the documentary.

Robert R. Kuehn, JD, professor of law, has been named associate dean for clinical education at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, effective July 1, 2011.

In recognition of national Undergraduate Research Week, April 11-15, research posters of Washington University undergraduate students were displayed on trees along Oak Walk. The Washington University Office of Undergraduate Research held a number of events last week to raise awareness about the importance of undergraduate research experiences for students’ development and engagement in a discipline.