At the Washington University in St. Louis Board of Trustees fall meeting Friday, Oct. 4, the trustees heard special reports on the Brown School and the university’s endowment. Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton also provided updates on construction projects.
In Green and Gray, his fearlessly experimental second collection, Geoffrey G. O’Brien fashions poetry from neighborhood flyers and political speeches, mixing phrases from Dante, the Patriot Act and Jean Genet. That audacious mingling of personal and political continues to inform People on Sunday, O’Brien’s latest, and most autobiographical, collection. On Oct. 10, O’Brien will read from his work for The Writing Program’s fall Reading Series.
This year’s Albert P. and Blanche Y. Greensfelder Lecture will focus on climate change and human health. The lecture will be 4 p.m. Friday, Oct. 18, in Simon Hall, May Auditorium. The speaker is Howard Frumkin, DrPh, MD, dean and professor at the University of Washington School of Public Health.
The controversy and legal battles surrounding the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act have led to a new – and worrisome – legal concept: the idea of a “corporate conscience,” warns Elizabeth Sepper, who teaches at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.
The slow rebound of the bedrock as ice melts can be used to weigh the Antarctic ice sheet. Calibrating rebound will make it possible to measure how much mass the has lost since the ice sheets reached their maximum extent more than 20,000 years ago and how much it is currently losing. Two National Science Foundation grants will fund the installation of seismographs to calibrate crucial parts
of the Antarctic ice-weighing machine.
Mitochondria are the power plants of cells, manufacturing fuel so a cell can perform its many tasks, and also are well known for their role in cell death. School of Medicine researchers and colleagues have shown that mitochondria also orchestrate events that determine a cell’s future, at least in the embryonic mouse heart. The study identifies new potential genetic culprits in the origins of some congenital heart defects. Shown is an image of a normal heart.
Why do some St. Louis neighborhoods rebound while others languish? That’s the question that will be at the forefront of a talk presented by Henry S. Webber, executive vice chancellor for administration at Washington University in St. Louis, and Todd Swanstrom, PhD, the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor in Community Collaboration and Public Policy at the University of Missouri St. Louis. That lecture, “Neighborhood Change in the St. Louis Region Since 1970: What Explains Neighborhood Success” takes place at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 10, in the Lee Auditorium of the Missouri History Museum.
The National Cancer Institute has awarded two major grants totaling $26 million to leukemia researchers and physicians at the School of Medicine. The funding has the potential to lead to novel therapies for leukemia that improve survival and reduce treatment-related side effects. Pictured are cancer cells from a patient with acute myeloid leukemia.