School of Medicine

Malnourished Haitian children will receive a therapuetic peanut-butter mixture to restore them to health thanks to a grant received by a School of Medicine clinician.

Harvey R. Colten, M.D., chair of the Department of Pediatrics from 1986-1997, died Thursday, May 24, 2007, at age 68.

Krikor T. Dikranian, M.D., Ph.D.; Jay F. Piccirillo, M.D.; and David W. Windus, M.D., recently received the Samuel R. Goldstein Leadership Awards for excellence in education.

William C. “Billy” Kaufmann, a multimedia specialist in Medical Computing Services at the School of Medicine, died Monday, May 14, 2007, in a motorcycle accident in south St. Louis.

The School of Medicine is launching the center for Women’s Infectious Disease Research, a new effort to study infectious diseases that preferentially affect women.

A $2.5 million grant will continue the University’s work with local AIDS service organizations and with local health departments to encourage HIV testing.

Scientists probing the details of viral infection have discovered an intriguing surprise: in mice, herpes viruses hijack their host cells’ tools for fixing DNA damage and use those tools to enhance their own reproduction.

Listed below are this month’s featured news stories. • Stress and Alzheimer’s (week of June 6) • Dietary calcium is better (week of June 13) • Treating prostate problems (week of June 20) • Fireworks safety (week of June 27)

An X-ray of a case of scoliosis.Physicians have recognized scoliosis, the abnormal curvature of the spine, since the time of Hippocrates, but its causes have remained a mystery — until now. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and collaborating institutions have discovered a gene that underlies the condition, which affects about three percent of all children. The finding lays the groundwork for determining how the genetic defect leads to the C- and S-shaped curves that characterize scoliosis.

The list of reasons you shouldn’t smoke has gotten longer. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are reporting that smoking interferes with ligament healing. Each year in the United States there are more than 20 million reported ligament injuries, and MCL injuries—which affect a ligament supporting the knee joint—are the most common. Studying mice with MCL injuries, the team discovered cigarette smoking impairs the recruitment of cells to the injury site and delays healing following ligament repair surgery.