School of Medicine

Two recently initiated School of Medicine programs will grant degrees and certificates this year to their first classes.

Mice with chronic herpes virus infections can better resist the bacterium that causes plague and a bacterium that causes one kind of food poisoning, researchers report in this week’s Nature. Scientists at the School of Medicine attributed the surprising finding to changes in the immune system triggered by the long-term presence of a latent herpes virus infection.

Listed below are this month’s featured news stories. • Alcohol’s effect on spouses (week of May 2) • DNA links to autism (week of May 9) • Fewer steroids for some with asthma (week of May 16) • Increasing blood flow (week of May 16) • New treatment for heart disorder (week of May 30)

Robert J. Hayashi, M.D., has been named director of the Division of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology in the Department of Pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine. A member of the faculty at the School of Medicine since 1992, Hayashi is an associate professor of pediatrics.

Andrey Shaw, M.D., has been named the Emil R. Unanue Professor of Immunobiology in the Department of Pathology and Immunology.

Three University scientists recently were elected to the National Academy of Sciences. WUSTL’s new academy members are Clifford M. Will, Ph.D., the James S. McDonnell Professor of Physics in Arts & Sciences; Wayne M. Yokoyama, M.D., the Sam J. Levin and Audrey Loew Levin Professor of Research in Arthritis and professor of medicine and of pathology and immunology; and Aaron J. Ciechanover, M.D., D.Sc., visiting professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine and the Research Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

Carl M. Bender, Ph.D., and Helen M. Piwnica-Worms, Ph.D., will receive the University’s 2007 faculty achievement awards, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton announced. Bender, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, is the winner of the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award, and Piwnica-Worms, professor of cell biology and physiology and of internal medicine at the School of Medicine, is the winner of the Carl and Gerty Cori Faculty Achievement Award.

Scientists have linked a protein to the body’s use of glucose and shown its potential as a target for new drugs to treat diabetes and obesity.

When repairing severed or damaged motor nerves with a donor nerve graft, surgeons have traditionally used a sensory nerve from another area of the patient’s body. However, these patients often do not fully regain function in the injured area. But now a team of surgeons at the School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital has found that repairing a motor nerve in rats with an intact motor nerve yields better results than using a sensory nerve. The research appeared in the March issue of the journal Microsurgery.

Scientists at the Genome Sequencing Center were among those to decode the rhesus macaque monkey genome, which shares about 93 percent of DNA with humans.