School of Medicine

The mix of microbes living inside the gut can protect against obesity, but a healthy diet is critical, according to School of Medicine scientists who transplanted intestinal microbes from obese and lean twins into mice and fed the animals different diets. Pictured are researchers Vanessa Ridaura, a graduate student, and Jeffrey I. Gordon, MD, director of the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology.

By passing surgical instruments through a patient’s mouth, School of Medicine doctors have corrected a problem that prevented a woman from easily swallowing food and liquids. The operation is one of the first of its kind in the region performed through a natural opening in the body rather than an incision. Pictured is the surgical knife (blue) in the esophagus.

Researchers have identified the mechanism by which a specific sirtuin protein called Sirt1 (shown in green) operates in the brain to bring about a significant delay in aging and an increase in longevity.

Rob Reich, PhD, associate professor of political science at Stanford University, has been named the 2013-14 Wells Fargo Advisors Visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship by the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. An expert on political theory, he will make four visits to WUSTL over the course of the 2013-14 academic year.

Washington University Orthopedics is opening a walk-in clinic for joggers, cyclists, high school athletes and weekend warriors who are injured outside of business hours.

An odd feature of nerve cells may be linked to several forms of inherited intellectual disability, Azad Bonni, MD, PhD, (pictured) and other School of Medicine researchers have learned. Further research eventually may help in the development of drugs to treat intellectual disability.

Victoria “Vicky” Holtschlag, a laboratory manager in the School of Medicine’s Department of Pathology and Immunology and at Siteman Cancer Center, died Sunday, June 30, 2013, from an illness. She was 58.

Bernard Becker, MD, professor emeritus of ophthalmology and visual sciences at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, died Wednesday Aug. 28, 2013, after a long illness. He was 93.

​Graduates of the Community Research Fellows Training program learn the language of academic researchers and how the two groups can work together to improve community health. Shown are recent graduates at a ceremony to recognize the achievement.

Here’s a sobering fact for millions of young women:  The more alcohol they drink before motherhood, the greater their risk of future breast cancer. School of Medicine research links increased breast cancer to drinking between early adolescence and first full-term pregnancy.