School of Medicine

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.

Courtesy PhotoFirst-year medical students spent a week at a Navajo Reservation in Arizona talking with middle- and high-school students about diabetes, obesity and substance abuse.

The School of Medicine has launched a wide-reaching initiative to encourage departments to hire and retain faculty from diverse backgrounds. In keeping with that initiative, the medical school will hold a symposium May 16 focusing on that mission.

Using an innovative statistical approach, a research team from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of California, Los Angeles, has identified two regions of DNA linked to autism. They found the suspicious DNA with a much smaller sample of people than has been used traditionally in searches for autism genes.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report they have developed an agent that protects cells from the lethal effects of radiation, regardless of whether it is given before or after exposure. Using this agent in mice, the investigators found that the treatment helped shield rapidly dividing cells that are most vulnerable to radiation-induced death, providing proof in principle that it is possible to fend off radiation damage.

DXA scans of a male patient with osteoporosisAlthough women are four times more likely than men to develop osteoporosis, or porous bone, one in 12 men also suffer from the disease, which can lead to debilitating – or even life-threatening – fractures. In women, low estrogen levels after menopause have been considered an important risk factor for this disorder. Now research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has shown that low amounts of active estrogen metabolites also can increase the the risk of osteoporosis in men.