A great talent and a lovely man

With his round glasses, amused diction and stiff, patrician carriage, Harold Ramis (AB ’66), was the coolest nerd in the room, a deadpan bomb-thrower, an ironist for the ages. You were never sure if he was joking. That was half the joke.

CANCELED: Nobel laureate neuroscientist Eric Kandel explores art and the mind/brain for the Assembly Series

What happens in your brain when you look at this Klimt painting? A lot more than you might ever guess, according to Nobel laureate neuroscientist Eric Kandel, who will explore the connection between art and the mind/brain in his talk, “The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present” for the Assembly Series at 5 p.m. Monday, March 3, in Graham Chapel.

Descendant of George Washington’s tree alive and well on Washington University’s campus

Whether he did or did not cut down that cherry tree, George Washington loved trees. He planted hundreds on his Mount Vernon estate. And, by George, Washington University in St. Louis has a direct descendent of one of those trees on its Danforth Campus. WUSTL’s horticuluturists have taken special care of the tree since receiving the seedling in 1991. One of 60 seedlings sent to sites around the country, only 12 offspring remain of Washington’s tulip poplar.

Surprising culprit found in cell recycling defect

Researchers at the School of Medicine have identified an unusual cause of the lysosomal storage disorder called mucolipidosis III, at least in a subset of patients. Unlike most genetic diseases that involve dysfunctional or missing proteins, the culprit is a normal protein that ends up in the wrong place.