WUSTL Politics & Public Policy News

Folic acid may reduce some childhood cancers

Jessica Martin — 2012-05-21 00:00:00

Folic acid fortification of foods may reduce the incidence of the most common type of kidney cancer and a type of brain tumors in children, finds a new study by Kimberly J. Johnson, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, and Amy Linabery, PhD, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota.

Incidence reductions were found for Wilms’ tumor, a type of kidney cancer, and primitive neuroectodermal tumors (PNET), a type of brain cancer.

Since 1998, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has mandated fortification of foods with folic acid because earlier studies show that prenatal consumption of folic acid significantly reduces the incidence of neural tube defects in babies.

“Our study is the largest to date to show that folic acid fortification may also lower the incidence of certain types of childhood cancer in the United States,” Johnson says.

The study, published in the current issue of Pediatrics, examined the incidence of childhood cancer pre- and post-mandated folic acid fortification.

“We found that Wilms’ tumor rates increased from 1986 to 1997 and decreased thereafter, which is an interesting finding since the downward change in the trend coincides exactly with folic acid fortification,” Johnson says.

“PNET rates increased from 1986 to 1993 and decreased thereafter. This change in the trend does not coincide exactly with folic acid fortification, but does coincide nicely with the 1992 recommendation for women of childbearing age to consume 400 micrograms of folic acid daily.”

Study authors used the 1986-2008 data from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program (SEER), which has collected information on cancer cases in various areas of the U.S. since 1973. The study involved 8,829 children, from birth to age four, diagnosed with cancer.

“Declines in Wilms’ tumors and PNETs in children were detected by multiple analyses of the data,” Johnson says.

“Importantly, the reduced rates of Wilms’ tumors also were found in a smaller study conducted in Ontario, Canada, that was published in 2011.

“More research is needed to confirm these results and to rule out any other explanations.”

Julie A. Ross, PhD, professor and director of the Division of Pediatric Epidemiology & Clinical Research in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, was a study co-author.

Johnson notes that one concern countries face as they are deciding whether or not to fortify foods to reduce neural tube defects in newborns is the possibility that fortification may cause unintended harm, such as causing new cancers or pre-cancerous lesions.

“Here, we are showing that folic acid fortification does not appear to be increasing rates of childhood cancers, which is good news,” she says.

For the full study, “Childhood Cancer Incidence Trends in Association With Folic Acid,” visit: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2012/05/15/peds.2011-3418.full.pdf+html

Atrocities Prevention Board could significantly change U.S. foreign policy

2012-05-15 00:00:00

President Barack Obama recently announced the establishment of an Atrocities Prevention Board as part of his comprehensive strategy to prevent genocide and mass atrocities.

“For the first time, the National Intelligence Council will prepare an estimate on the global risk of mass atrocities and genocide,” says Leila Nadya Sadat, JD, international law expert and director of the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law.

Sadat

“By sensitizing the diplomatic and intelligence communities to atrocities risk and systematizing responses to potential crises, the policies of the Atrocities Prevention Board could significantly change U.S. foreign policy,” she says.

The Atrocities Prevention Board is a key feature of the reforms package initiated following the Presidential Study Directive in August 2011 that made the prevention of atrocities a key thrust of U.S. foreign policy.

The board is made up of senior officials from throughout the federal government, including the U.S. Departments of State and Defense as well as the federal agency USAID, and will convene once a month to create and implement policies to prevent atrocities and respond urgently to situations as they arise.

Sadat, the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law at WUSTL, is director of the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative, which has drafted a Proposed International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Humanity (law.wustl.edu/harris/crimesagainsthumanity/).

She noted “the adoption of the Proposed Convention would provide a tool that the Atrocities Prevention Board can use to address developing or ongoing situations of mass atrocities by ensuring that states – including the United States – do not unwittingly or purposefully harbor the perpetrators of crimes against humanity.”

“This bold move by the president sends a clear message that the United States is committed to preventing and responding to atrocities as a moral stance as well,” Sadat says.

Study finds chronic child abuse strong indicator of negative adult experiences

2012-05-07 00:00:00

Child abuse or neglect are strong predictors of major health and emotional problems, but little is known about how the chronicity of the maltreatment may increase future harm apart from other risk factors in a child’s life.

In a new study published in the current issue of the journal Pediatrics, Melissa Jonson-Reid, PhD, child welfare expert and a professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, looked at how chronic maltreatment impacted the future health and behavior of children and adults.

Jonson-Reid

The study tracked children by number of child maltreatment reports (zero to four or more) and followed the children into early adulthood, by which time some of the children had become parents.

The study sought to determine how well the number of child maltreatment reports predicted poor outcomes in adolescence, such as delinquency, substance abuse in the teen years or getting a sexually transmitted disease.

“For every measure studied, a more chronic history of child maltreatment reports was powerfully predictive of worse outcomes,” Jonson-Reid says.

“For most outcomes, having a single maltreatment report put children at a 20 percent to 50 percent higher risk than non-maltreated comparison children.

In addition, a series of adult outcomes were tracked to see if the chronicity of maltreatment still mattered after controlling for the poor outcomes in adolescence. Adult outcomes included adult substance abuse or growing up and having children whom they then maltreated.

“In models of adult outcomes, children with four or more reports were about least twice as likely to later abuse their own children and have contact with the mental health system, even when controlling for the negative outcomes during adolescence.”

Jonson-Reid says that there appears to be good reason to put resources into preventing ongoing maltreatment.

“Successfully interrupting chronic child maltreatment may well reduce risk of a wide range of other costly child and adolescent health and behavioral problems,” she says.

Jonson-Reid cites a recently published Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study estimating lifetime costs for a single year’s worth of children reported for maltreatment at $242 billion. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0145213411003140)

“What our study illustrates is that these costs are even more likely to accrue for children who continue to be re-reported,” she says.

The study also found that maltreatment predicts a range of negative adolescent outcomes, and those adolescent outcomes then predict poor adult outcomes.

“If the poor outcomes in adolescence can be dealt with effectively, then later adult outcomes may also be forestalled,” Jonson-Reid says.

“Our findings could therefore be interpreted as supporting many current evidence-based interventions that seek to improve behavioral and social functioning among children and adolescents who have experienced trauma like abuse or neglect.”

Jonson-Reid co-authored the study, “Child and Adult Outcomes of Chronic Child Maltreatment,” with fellow Brown School faculty members Patricia L. Kohl, PhD, associate professor, and F. Brett Drake, PhD, professor.

To view the full study visit: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2012/04/17/peds.2011-2529.abstract.

This chart illustrates the individual childhood and adult outcomes according to the number of reports that occurred before the event of interest. Because it was possible for some children to enter the study period with a pre-existing condition, these are indicated as gray or black bars with the legend indicating the outcome occurred “before the study.” Chronicity is associated with increasing risk for all but child maltreatment perpetration, violent delinquency, and head or brain injury. In these cases, there is a slight decline in prevalence for the highest category compared with middle categories, but in all cases having reports was associated with higher rates of outcomes.

Greece could be broke by June, economist says

Neil Schoenherr — 2012-05-07 00:00:00

If international lenders refuse to renegotiate substantial reductions in Greek public debt, chances are that whatever government emerges in Greece in the next few weeks will run out of cash by the end of June, says an economist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Azariadis

“At that point, a suspension of interest payments will become almost inevitable, pushing Greece out of the Eurozone and back to the drachma,” says Costas Azariadis, PhD, the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences.

“The repercussions from an outright default on the Euro are hard to predict and include some scary scenarios,” the Greek-born Azariadis says.

The May 6 Greek election is expected to result in weeks of financial upheaval after voters took mainstream politicians to task for months of crippling austerity measures and voted a far-right extremist group into Parliament.

“With this election, voters in Greece — and in France as well — lashed out against fiscal austerity,” Azariadis says.

“Politicians who favored the Northern European model of balanced budgets, labor market reforms and global competitiveness were sent packing,” he says. “Many voters, especially those working in the public sector, opted to preserve the European welfare state with a strong safety net, good pensions and free medical care.”

The biggest gainers from the election are fringe parties on the extreme left and extreme right of the political spectrum, he says.

“What distinguishes those parties from others is a desire to renegotiate, and possibly to abrogate, the bailout agreements made with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund by the outgoing caretaker government headed by Lucas Papademos,” Azariadis says.

Greek conservative leader Antonis Samaras was given three days to assemble a coalition from a governing body divided on whether to renege on the terms of bailout agreements negotiated in May 2010.

The conservative New Democracy party and the socialist PASOK party, which were political rivals until the Greek debt crisis made them partners in the national government in 2011, are two seats short of the 151 seats needed for a parliamentary majority.

Greek voters, who Azariadis notes must deal with a 22 percent unemployment rate and a 20 percent drop in incomes, gave a clear signal that austerity has gone too far.

“Prospects for growth continue to be dismal for them and uncertain for the rest of Southern Europe, putting enormous pressure on the Eurozone,” Azariadis says. “Can the European Union find a recipe for faster growth while it keeps public spending under control?

“That seems to be the key question posed by the May 6 vote.”

National Day of Prayer takes on added significance in 2012

Jessica Martin — 2012-04-25 00:00:00

The National Day of Prayer typically sparks debate about whether the day violates the establishment clause from the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

This year’s observance on May 3, however, likely will take on added significance, says John Inazu, JD, First Amendment expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. The reason? 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Engel v. Vitale, which invalidated official prayer in public schools.

“Some religious believers will likely use the day of prayer to call attention to what they view as a regrettable and consequential decision,” Inazu says.

Establishment clause questions persist

The constitutionality of the National Day of Prayer hinges on the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which has been interpreted to prohibit the establishment of state-endorsed religion and/or the preference of one religion over another.

Whether official recognition of the National Day of Prayer violates the establishment clause is a complicated question, says Gregory Magarian, JD, constitutional law expert and WUSTL law professor.

“There are two particular aspects of the National Day of Prayer issue that make it a tough one,” Magarian says.

“First, the question whether official policies that favor religion generally over non-religion generally has divided the justices of the Supreme Court, with no truly authoritative resolution to the question. Arguably the National Day of Prayer is such a policy. On the other hand, it may not be; not all religious practices prominent in the United States involve ‘prayer’ as such.

“Second, the court tends to grow more concerned about official policies that favor religion when the policies entail some kind of actual observance. Official recognition of a National Day of Prayer, without more, doesn't make anyone do anything.”

Magarian says that if a public school imposed a prayer requirement on students in conjunction with the National Day of Prayer, it certainly would violate the establishment clause.

“But arguably official recognition of the day, without more, simply amounts to the sort of ‘ceremonial deism’ that the court has long tolerated, for example, in allowing the words ‘In God We Trust’ to appear on money,” he says.

“On the other hand, the court's prevailing doctrine rejects official practices that send a message of endorsement of religion, on grounds that such endorsements treat nonbelievers as second-class citizens.”

Magarian believes the current court would reject an establishment clause challenge to the National Day of Prayer, treating official recognition of the day as an inconsequential instance of ceremonial deism that shows equal regard to many religious beliefs.

Inazu agrees but cautions that secular opponents to prayer in schools should not be the only ones concerned by that outcome.

“For many religious believers, prayer matters because its object — God — matters. If the justification for ‘official’ prayer renders the prayer merely ‘ceremonial,’ then observing the National Day of Prayer may be at cross-purposes with faithfulness.

“Ceremonial deism risks harming believers as well as non-believers,” Inazu says.

McBride named 2012 National Rural Health Association’s Outstanding Researcher

2012-04-20 00:00:00

The National Rural Health Association (NRHA) honored Timothy D. McBride, PhD, associate dean for public health at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, with its Outstanding Researcher Award April 19 during the NRHA’s 35th annual Rural Health Conference.

McBride is part of a small group of individuals and organizations being recognized for their work in rural health care.

McBride

“We’re especially proud of this year’s winners,” says Alan Morgan, chief executive officer of the NRHA.

“They have each already made tremendous strides to advance rural health care, and we’re confident they will continue to help improve the lives of rural Americans.”

McBride has conducted rural health services research for more than 20 years. He is an influential health policy analyst and leading health economist shaping the national agenda in rural health care, health insurance, Medicare policy, health economics, and access to health care.

McBride’s work in rural health care focuses on studying the uninsured, Medicare Advantage and Part D in rural areas.

He is an advocate for rural people, providing testimony to Congress and consulting with important policy constituents in Medicare and rural health policy. He is a member of the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI) Health Panel that provides expert advice on rural health issues to the U.S. Congress and other policymakers.

“I consider it a great honor to receive this award from the rural health association and my professional colleagues,” McBride says.

“At this critical juncture, when we are working to implement health reform in rural America, it means even more to me to receive this on behalf of rural Americans and others who need the kinds of reforms that are contained in the health reform law.

“However, I know that the work I have completed over the years would not have been possible without literally dozens of colleagues I have collaborated with over the years,” he says.

NRHA’s Annual Rural Health Conference is the largest gathering of rural health professionals in the nation.

“Every year, rural Americans come together to gain education and raise awareness on behalf of the 62 million Americans who live in rural areas and desperately need access to affordable health care,” Morgan says.

NRHA is a nonprofit organization working to improve the health and well-being of rural Americans and providing leadership on rural health issues through advocacy, communications, education and research.

NRHA membership is made up of 22,000 diverse individuals and organizations, all of whom share the common bond of an interest in rural health.

Exploring the American Dream

2012-04-17 00:00:00

What is the American Dream’s role in today’s society? Experts from Washington University in St. Louis will explore this question in a panel discussion at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 18, in Brown Hall Lounge on the Danforth Campus.

Panelists are:

Steven Fazzari, PhD, professor of economics in Arts & Sciences;
Carter W. Lewis, playwright-in-residence in the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences; and
Mark R. Rank, PhD, the Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare at the Brown School.

Fazzari, an expert on macroeconomics, and Rank, an expert on poverty, are currently teaching the popular course “The Economic Realities of the American Dream.”

Over the past few years, Rank has interviewed people from all walks of life for an upcoming book on the tenuous nature of the American Dream in today’s society. Lewis is working with Rank to adapt some of these interviews for the stage.

Following comments from the panel, Edward F. Lawlor, PhD, dean of the Brown School and the William E. Gordon Distinguished Professor, will lead a discussion with the audience.

The Brown School Alumni Association is hosting the event, which is free and open to the public.

To register, email reism@wustl.edu or (314) 935-4780.

Reactions to POTUS Supreme Court comments ‘reflect historical ignorance’

Jessica Martin — 2012-04-05 00:00:00

The Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care act has prompted some interesting and provocative issues about – and between – the president and the judicial branch, says Gregory P. Magarian, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis and former clerk for retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

“President (Barack) Obama recently suggested that for the court to overrule a major federal statute would be ‘unprecedented,’” he says.

Magarian

“He quickly amended his remarks, and properly so. The landmark case of Marbury v. Madison long ago established that the Supreme Court has power to declare federal statutes unconstitutional.”

Some commentators and judges reacted with alarm to Obama’s original comments, suggesting that they amounted to presidential intimidation of the Supreme Court.

Judge Jerry Smith of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals went so far as to lecture a Department of Justice lawyer about judicial power, ordering the lawyer to write the court a three-page memo explaining the court’s power to strike down statutes.

“These alarmed reactions reflect historical ignorance,” Magarian says.

“Presidents from the beginning of the republic, notably including Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, have verbally castigated the court in terms that make President Obama’s remarks sound like a fan letter.

“Presidents speak out on public issues, and the Supreme Court enjoys no immunity from the bully pulpit. Judge Smith’s tantrum is much more remarkable: for a federal judge to punish a government lawyer because the judge dislikes the president’s opinions reflects a startling lapse of professionalism and judicial temperament.”

Magarian says that even so, federal judges are supposed to be independent, and everyone – including believers in the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality – should respect that fact.

At least one liberal commentator has argued that Congress should impeach the justices of the Supreme Court if they strike down the act.

“The Constitution does allow Congress to impeach federal judges, like the president, for ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’ Congress has impeached and tried judges over the years, although it has not impeached a Supreme Court justice since the early days of the republic.

“But anyone who calls for impeachment of the justices based on opposition to their judicial opinions would do well to remember that the last major movement to impeach a member of the court targeted Chief Justice Earl Warren over the issue of school desegregation.

“The best understanding of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ is that only official misconduct warrants impeachment. The Supreme Court has made some awful decisions in its history, but even an awful decision is not a crime.”

Related history

The Supreme Court has struck down numerous federal statutes over the decades.

“What the president meant, as his amended remarks made clear, was that no precedent existed for the court to hold that a major economic regulation exceeded federal power,” Magarian says.

“That statement is correct. The court has struck down federal economic regulations, most recently in 1936, but beginning in 1937, the court sharply repudiated its earlier actions and adopted a very broad view of federal power to regulate the national economy.

“Thus, a Supreme Court decision to strike down the Affordable Care Act would be unprecedented -- although, in fairness, the ‘individual mandate’ at the heart of the case differs from earlier regulations the court has upheld.”

Most Americans, including Romney supporters, favor higher tax on rich, survey finds

Neil Schoenherr — 2012-04-13 00:00:00

President Barack Obama lately has been arguing for increased taxes on the rich through his proposed “Buffett Rule,” which would ensure that millionaires and billionaires pay a minimum effective tax rate of 30 percent on their income.

But how do Americans view raising taxes on the rich? It turns out most support such a move, finds a new Washington University in St. Louis survey.

The American Panel Survey (TAPS), a random sample of 1,370 adults, finds that 93 percent of those who consider themselves Obama supporters favor increasing taxes on households making more than $1 million a year.

More than 66 percent of those who consider themselves Mitt Romney supporters would be in favor of such increases.

“While our survey did not ask in detail about the Buffett rule, the American public clearly favors higher taxes on high-income taxpayers,” says Steven S. Smith, PhD, the Kate M. Gregg Distinguished Professor of Social Science and director of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy, which coordinates the TAPS survey.

“This is true even of a majority of Romney supporters,” Smith says. “Democrats in the Senate realize this. They want to put Republicans in a position of casting an unpopular vote, even if it is procedural vote to take up the issue.”

The TAPS results indicate that Americans oppose increases in their own taxes and the taxes of small business whether they are Obama or Romney supporters.

While a majority favor increasing taxes on upper income households and corporations, there are large differences between Obama and Romney supporters on most tax issues.

“The results for individual spending and tax questions can be misleading and are difficult to summarize,” Smith says. “To gain a better overview we have developed scales for domestic spending and tax policy. These yield a general measure of each respondent’s views of the issues and can be compared across Romney and Obama supporters.”

On domestic spending, Smith says, the differences between the Obama and Romney supporters are apparent, though there is a substantial number of Americans who fall in the middle of the spectrum in the overlap between the two groups. (See Figure 1)

On taxation, Obama supporters are considerably more supportive of tax increases than Romney supporters. Obama supporters are substantially more unified in their views about taxes than Romney supporters, Smith says. (See Figure 2)

Neither set of partisans favors changes in most tax deductions and credits. Romney supporters are somewhat more in favor than Obama supporters of keeping or expanding these tax breaks. (See Figure 3)

TAPS is based on a national probability sample. It launched in fall 2011 and published its first finding in January 2012. As a panel, the survey returns to the same respondents each month, which allows for measuring change in attitudes among individuals over time and results in the accumulation of more data about the respondents than in most surveys.

The typical monthly survey includes about 1,600 respondents from a larger panel of 2,100.

TAPS is implemented by Knowledge Networks of Palo Alto, Calif.

For more information on the project or other data from this month’s survey, email Smith at taps@wustl.edu.

More information about TAPS is available at taps.wustl.edu.

Campus Authors: Ross C. Brownson, Graham A. Colditz and Enola K. Proctor

Jessica Martin — 2012-04-12 00:00:00

It can take nearly two decades for research discoveries to make their way into public health, mental health and health-care settings. The emerging field of dissemination and implementation (D&I) research seeks to narrow the gap between evidence-based research and routine practice.

To help propel this crucial field forward, leading D&I scholars and researchers contributed to Dissemination and Implementation Research in Health: Translating Science to Practice, a new book published by Oxford University Press.

Edited by Washington University in St. Louis researchers Ross C. Brownson, PhD, Graham A. Colditz, MD, DrPH, and Enola K. Proctor, PhD, the book is a roadmap for research translation, with broad appeal for researchers and practitioners in epidemiology, biostatistics, behavioral science, economics, medicine, social work, psychology and anthropology.

“It is incumbent upon every researcher to remember that we don’t conduct research simply to foster additional research, but rather, our goal is to apply what we learn to improve health,” says Brownson, professor and co-director of the Prevention Research Center in St. Louis at the School of Medicine and the Brown School at WUSTL.

“We decided to put together this book in order to document promising methods for shortening the gap between the discovery of new knowledge and its application in the ‘real world.’”

Proctor, the Frank J. Bruno Professor of Social Work Research at the Brown School, notes that the field of dissemination and implementation science is rapidly growing but widely scattered; it has no “disciplinary home.”

“Washington University, with its ease of transdisciplinary collaboration and proclivity for fostering new ideas, has been a wonderful base in which D&I researchers can thrive,” she says.

“Supported by the only extramural NIH training grant in this field, we bring junior investigators and leading researchers in the field to Washington University each year for the Implementation Research Institute, and our Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences has one of the only D&I research cores in the country.

“Because the field is in early stages of development and because we are deeply involved in training the next, or maybe first, generation of D&I researchers, we knew the time was right for this book, the first of its kind.”

The book offers information on how to evaluate the evidence based on effective interventions; which strategies will produce the greatest impact; how to design an appropriate study; and how to track a set of essential outcomes.

It also tackles the particular dissemination and information challenges in several fields, including the social services, public health clinics, schools, health care and public policy.

Shortening the translational pipeline

“Although we have a remarkable foundation of knowledge in all disciplines related to health care, public health, social services, and mental health, the gap between the care that could be — if it were informed by that knowledge— and the care that is in routine practice has been characterized as a ‘chasm’ by the Institute of Medicine,” Proctor says.

“The ‘translational pipeline’ — which now takes decades — needs to be shortened, and can be — we think — through the promise of D&I science.”

Colditz, the Niess-Gain Professor of Surgery and associate director of Prevention and Control at the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center at the School of Medicine, says that a common language and a move toward common tools will help speed this translation to implementation pipeline.

D&I studies also must take into account the barriers to application of evidence-based interventions in the communities where people live their lives and the social service agencies, hospitals and clinics where they receive care.

D&I research holds unique promise for helping ensure that our nation’s investment in basic and clinical research can be translated into improvements in community-based settings. D&I science offers return on investment, and potential to reduce disparities and improve the quality of health and behavioral health care, as well as social services.

“We now have a solid set of tools for conducting D&I science,” Colditz says.

“Our book provides a strong foundation and charts direction for the field’s further development for the next foreseeable years,” he says.

“Scientifically, we still have a long way to go. The next generation of studies should address implementation of evidence-based services within dynamic service delivery systems, and address challenges of sustaining and scaling up quality care for population impact.”

For more information, visit oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Medicine/EpidemiologyBiostatistics/?view=usa&ci=9780199751877.

NBC News analyst Todd to speak April 16 on American politics and upcoming election

Neil Schoenherr — 2012-04-09 00:00:00

Chuck Todd, chief White House correspondent for NBC News, will present “American Politics and the 2012 Elections” at 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 16, in Graham Chapel at Washington University in St. Louis.

Todd

Todd’s talk is free and open to the public.

The event is sponsored by WUSTL’s Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.

Todd became political director at NBC News in 2007. He also co-hosts The Daily Rundown on MSNBC and serves as on-air political analyst for NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, Today, Meet the Press and MSNBC.

In addition to his on-air analysis, Todd has been responsible for all aspects of the network’s political coverage, serving as the point person for political news and information.

He also is the editor of First Read, NBC’s guide to political news and trends in and around Washington, D.C.

In 2009, Todd co-authored with Sheldon Gawiser the definitive election result analysis book for the 2008 presidential campaign, How Barack Obama Won.

Before joining NBC News, Todd was the editor-in-chief of National Journal’s The Hotline, Washington’s premier daily briefing on American politics.

In his 15 years working at The Hotline or one of its affiliates, Todd became one of Washington’s foremost experts on political campaigns of all levels. He served as editor-in-chief for six years. He also serves as a contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly, where he pens political essays.

Todd frequently contributes op-ed essays for various publications, including The New York Times and the Washington Post.

During the 2004 elections, he moderated one of the few presidential candidate forums in Iowa.

In addition to Todd's extensive media presence, he has served as an adjunct professor, teaching a graduate-level political communications course at Johns Hopkins University.

Morris to deliver Friedman lecture

2012-04-09 00:00:00

John C. Morris, MD, the Harvey A. and Dorismae Hacker Friedman Distinguished Professor of Neurology and director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Washington University School of Medicine, will deliver the 2012 Friedman lecture at 3 p.m. April 30 in Graham Chapel. His lecture is titled “The Aging Mind: Realities and Myths.”

A reception will follow at 5 p.m. at the Danforth University Center.

Morris, internationally known for his work on cognitive impairment, was the founding director of the Harvey A. Friedman Center for Aging. Nancy Morrow-Howell, PhD, was recently named director of the Friedman Center for Aging, which is now a part of Washington University’s Institute for Public Health.

In addition, the Alene and Meyer Kopolow Award and the Dorismae and Harvey A. Friedman Award will be presented on behalf of the Friedman Center for Aging and the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Foundation.

The event is free and open to the public. To register, go to http://bit.ly/Apr30FCA.

Ob/gyn's dream for women's hospital in Africa comes true

Diane Duke Williams — 2012-04-03 00:00:00

Courtesy photo

Lewis Wall, MD (center), addresses the crowd at the grand opening of the Danja Fistula Center in Niger, Africa.

For Lewis Wall, MD, a dream has come true.

For almost 20 years, he worked doggedly to build a hospital in one of the world’s poorest countries to treat women with a devastating childbirth injury. His dream became a reality in February, when a 42-bed hospital opened in Niger, Africa. The facility is dedicated to repairing fistulas, wounds inflicted by prolonged labor, which leave women — and often girls — steadily leaking urine and sometimes feces.

“It was wonderful to be there that day,” says Wall, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and a physician at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. “This hospital may seem small by American standards, but it will make a large difference in the lives of so many African women who have suffered needlessly for too long.”

For most of his career, Wall’s passion has been to end the scourge of fistulas in Africa. He first saw the miserable lives of women with this injury when he worked as an anthropologist in West Africa in his mid-20s.

Fistulas are easy to repair in developed countries. But in Africa, many women don’t have access to medical care during childbirth or afterward if injuries occur.

Fistulas occur in women of all ages but are more common among those who marry young and whose narrow pelvises make them susceptible to childbirth trauma. Many of these women are divorced by their husbands, cast out by their families and must eke out a meager living with no marketable skills. Often, they live humiliating, desolate lives on the edge of their villages, with only rags to catch their waste.

“When these girls get a fistula, life is basically over for them,” says Wall, who enrolled in medical school at age 27 because he decided the world needed more doctors than anthropologists. “They become social pariahs. With an inexpensive surgical repair, we are able to give them back their life and dignity. It’s astonishing.”

In 1995, after visiting a large fistula hospital in Ethiopia, Wall envisioned opening a similar hospital in West Africa, where fistulas are prevalent.

He founded the nonprofit Worldwide Fistula Fund to raise money to construct hospitals to repair fistulas. The fund has helped support and build a number of fistula centers in Africa. It also has provided money to train local doctors to perform the surgical procedure and to help raise awareness of the problem.

In Africa, girls often marry as young as 12. Many cannot deliver babies safely because their birth canals are not fully developed. These young women may labor for five or six days only to deliver a stillborn baby. The treatment for obstructed labor is a cesarean section, but this care is not available in many parts of Africa. As a result, women often develop fistulas.

In Niger, among the scattered grasslands on the edge of the Saharan desert, people grow millet and raise sheep, cattle and goats. The majority of people live on less than $1 a day. There are very few personal or private resources for medical clinics or hospitals.

Getting the Danja Fistula Center built in Niger was much harder than Wall anticipated, he says.

“I thought I was fairly realistic because I had lived in West Africa for two years,” he says. “But we had to contend with unexpected obstacles — bureaucratic hassles, insects, a lack of communication and supplies, and people who thought their own interests would be threatened.”

He also had to raise about $1 million.

Large contributions from the Trio Foundation of St. Louis, South African musician Dave Matthews and an executive at Merrill Lynch helped the Worldwide Fistula Fund reach its goal. The fund also received many small personal donations, including $35 from a potluck hosted by a group of elderly women in New York.

“This was not my individual achievement — it was from the efforts of thousands of people,” he says.

Mark Manary, MD, the Helene B. Roberson Professor of Pediatrics, understands some of the obstacles Wall faced in getting the hospital built. Manary has spent more than 15 years treating malnourished children in Africa. He started a nonprofit organization, Project Peanut Butter, that each year produces between 1,000 to 1,250 tons of a peanut-butter mixture in Africa to treat children with malnutrition.

“Wall’s work removes a huge burden, a permanent scar from the lives of thousands of African women,” Manary says. “I admire his commitment and persistence.”

Each year, about 1,000 women will have fistula surgery in the hospital, affiliated with an existing leprosy hospital run by a Christian missionary organization. Some will travel hundreds of miles in trucks and buses to get there.

Aside from repairing fistulas, the hospital will oversee outreach efforts to promote maternal health and reduce childbirth deaths. It also will educate women about microfinance to teach them about business and empowerment.

The new hospital is part of a grand vision to eradicate fistulas worldwide by building fistula centers that would serve as focus points for maternity care and public health outreach in the world’s poorest countries.

“For starters, we hope this hospital will help countless women and alleviate human suffering,” Wall says. “We also hope it will advance women’s rights and gender equality. But for now, I’m just going to enjoy this accomplishment. There still is a lot of work to d0.”

Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

'Brazil Rising' symposium at WUSTL April 4-6

2012-03-29 00:00:00

A symposium focusing on culture, law and development in Brazil will be held April 4-6 at Washington University in St. Louis. Events include a film, a dance and percussion workshop and keynote lecture.

The symposium is being held not only to have fun celebrating Brazilian culture, but also to investigate development in Brazil, an urgent and controversial topic both local and global in scope, says symposium organizer Derek Pardue, PhD, assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences.

Stock Exchange

The flag of Brazil. Brazil, the largest country in South America, is gaining increased attention as a world power.

“Brazil has attracted spectators and scientists from around the world for decades due to its Carnival festivals, soccer players, groovy infectious pop music, Brazilian ideas and practices of racial mixture, and the art and danger of shantytown life,” says Pardue, also assistant professor of international and area studies in Arts & Sciences.

“Since the turn of the 21st century, Brazil has gone to another level and gained increasing attention as a major player in geopolitics and global economics,” Pardue says. “Brazil deserves critical inquiry.”

All events are free and open to the public, with the exception of the April 6 book discussion, which is open only to WUSTL faculty and graduate students.

The symposium schedule:

Wednesday, April 4

Film Toxic Amazon (2011) and discussion, 4 p.m. Busch 100
Brazilian journalist and environmental activist Felipe Milanez will participate in a conversation about the violence associated with development and law in the Amazon. Milanez was named a “Forest Hero” by the United Nations in 2012.

Dance & Percussion Workshop, 7 p.m. the Gargoyle in Mallinckrodt Center
Attendees can learn to dance and play samba with instructor Eliana Oliveira and percussionist Moacyr Marchini. This event is limited to the first 20 people who sign up to svital@wustl.edu by Monday, April 2.

Thursday, April 5

Keynote talk “The Dirty Politics of Shantytown Radicalism: Murder, Slander and Associational Life in Mid-Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro,” 6 p.m. Women’s Building Formal Lounge
This lecture, by Brodwyn Fischer, PhD, associate professor of history at Northwestern University, focuses on Rio de Janeiro’s first favela (slum) association in the 1950s, the leader of which later was credibly accused of the sort of land-grabbing and violence the association fought against. The talk also will examine the problems of idealization of grassroots lawmaking and associations and of plural sources of power/rights/law when they are not constrained by any baseline societal consensus.

Friday, April 6

Discussion of book A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro (2008), 10 a.m.
Faculty and graduate students can participate in the African Diaspora Reading Group discussion of the award-winning book A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro with the book’s author, Brodwyn Fischer (also the keynote speaker). For more information, email ymiki@wustl.edu.

Refreshments will be available at all events except the Dance & Percussion Workshop.

Organizers of the event, along with Pardue, are Selma Vital, PhD, lecturer in Portuguese in Arts & Sciences; Yuko Miki, PhD, assistant professor of history in Arts & Sciences; and freshman Theresa Jahl.

The events are sponsored by International and Area Studies, the departments of Anthropology and of History, and the Association of Latin American Students.

For more information, visit artsci.wustl.edu/%7Edpardue/web_pardue/BRising2012.html or email Pardue at dpardue@wustl.edu.

Study looks at discrimination’s impact on smoking

Jessica Martin — 2012-03-15 00:00:00

Smoking, the leading preventable cause of mortality in the United States, continues to disproportionately impact lower income members of racial and ethnic minority groups.

In a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health, Jason Q. Purnell, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, looked at how perceived discrimination influences smoking rates among these groups.

“We found that regardless of race or ethnicity, the odds of current smoking were higher among individuals who perceived that they were treated differently because of their race, though racial and ethnic minority groups were more likely to report discrimination,” he says.

Purnell

“In follow-up analyses considering specific types of discrimination, only worse treatment in the workplace was significantly associated with current smoking after accounting for other factors; individuals who reported worse treatment in the workplace were 42 percent more likely to smoke.”

The study also found that people who reported better treatment in health care settings than other races were 21 percent less likely to be current smokers.”

“It’s important to understand the factors that promote smoking among racial and ethnic minority groups,” Purnell says.

Analyzing a multistate, multiethnic study of over 85,000 individuals by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Purnell used data from 2004-08 from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). Beginning in 2002, an optional module, Reactions to Race, was added to the BRFSS and adopted by several states in an attempt to capture data on perceived racial discrimination and its effects in a population-based sample.

“As expected, everyday smokers were more likely than occasional smokers, and occasional smokers were in turn more likely than nonsmokers, to report being the target of perceived discrimination in both health-care settings and the workplace,” he says.

“Smokers were more likely than nonsmokers to report emotional and physical symptoms in response to perceived discrimination, although occasional smokers were more likely than everyday smokers to report both emotional and physical symptoms.”

Purnell says the study highlights a potentially high-risk group of individuals who report feeling unfairly treated because of their race and who may be smoking as a means of coping with the psychological distress associated with discrimination.

“Identifying these individuals for targeted smoking cessation interventions may improve cessation rates,” he says.

“Our findings also suggest that alternative forms of coping with discrimination may be a fruitful area of discussion in counseling interventions designed to help individuals quit smoking.”

Purnell’s article, “Perceived Discrimination, Psychological Distress, and Current Smoking Status: Results From the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Reactions to Race Module, 2004–2008,” was written with:

Luke J. Peppone, PhD, research assistant professor of radiation oncology at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC);
Kassandra Alcaraz, doctoral student at WUSTL’s Brown School;
Amy McQueen, PhD, research assistant professor of internal medicine at the WUSTL School of Medicine;
Joseph J. Guido, associate in the department of biostatistics and computational biology at URMC;
Jennifer K. Carroll, MD, assistant professor of family medicine at URMC;
Enbal Shacham, PhD, assistant professor of behavioral science and health education at Saint Louis University; and
Gary R. Morrow, PhD, professor of radiation oncology and of psychiatry at URMC.

For the full study, visit ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2012.300694.

Supreme Court’s health-care decision to shape presidential campaign, says WUSTL health economist

2012-03-23 00:00:00

The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will have a major impact on the presidential campaign, says Timothy D. McBride, PhD, health economist and associate dean for public health at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

McBride

“The health reform legislation was the signature piece of social legislation passed by President (Barack) Obama’s administration in his first term,” he says.

The court began hearing arguments in the case March 26. How its decision will influence the election could be quite complex, says McBride.

“If the court upholds the legislation, then the administration will herald this as a major victory and state that this as a major accomplishment, putting an exclamation point on their signature legislative accomplishment.

“On the other hand, if the court strikes down the ACA, on the surface this could be seen as a major blow to the administration, and a huge boost to the Republicans, who have argued for repeal of the whole legislation,” McBride says.

McBride notes that the administration asked for the Supreme Court to consider the ACA before the election.

“This surprised me, but I can see the strategy,” he says.

“If the court strikes down the ACA, the Obama administration can make it a campaign issue to rally their base and argue it is imperative to re-elect the President to stave off the attack on health reform.”

McBride says this case, in which the major issues are the individual mandate to purchase health insurance and the expansion of Medicaid, is widely anticipated because the challenges to health reform have largely halted the legislation’s implementation in many of the states.

Gambling addictions expert warns of dangers of Internet gambling, especially on youth

Jessica Martin — 2012-03-15 00:00:00

Participating in an online March Madness bracket or fantasy sport league is harmless fun for most people, but for someone with a gambling addiction, it can be a dangerous temptation.

“Now, with states entertaining the possibility of increasing revenue through legalizing internet gambling, it is even more important to pay attention to groups that may be vulnerable to problem gambling, particularly youth,” says Renee Cunningham-Williams, PhD, gambling addictions expert and associate professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

Cunningham-Williams

“Internet gambling provides youth with increased opportunities to gamble, which is particularly concerning because this generation is arguably the most technologically savvy of any generation in history.”

Cunningham-Williams says that young people have not passed through the period of risk for many mental disorders, yet need to navigate coming of age in an environment of increased acceptability and accessibility to gambling.

“Based on available research, it is unclear if the Internet contributes to more gambling problems, but we know that those who choose to gamble using the Internet and experience problems are often involved in other forms of gambling as well,” she says.

“The Internet may make gambling opportunities more attractive, accessible and available.”

Cunningham-Williams agrees with the National Council on Problem Gambling’s position that advocates a harm-reduction public health approach to problem gambling.

“Such an approach recognizes that strong regulation is necessary but not sufficient,” she says.

“We need a comprehensive strategy that involves prevention and education about the harms associated with illegal and problem gambling, effective treatment, and continued research. We do not currently have a lead federal agency to advocate for efforts to reduce the harm associated with problem gambling.”

Cunningham-Williams says that although most Americans gamble without significant problems, for those who do experience problems, and the even larger at-risk groups, the individual, familial and social costs are devastating.

“There is help available — call 1-888-bets off,” she says.

Youth Justice Program at Washington University law school March 22 and 23

Jessica Martin — 2012-03-19 00:00:00

Experts on youth advocacy and school desegregation will come together March 22 and 23 for a series of events as part of the Youth Justice Program at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law.

Events are free and open to the public and will be held in the Bryan Cave Courtroom of Anheuser-Busch Hall, Room 310.

The Youth Justice Program begins at noon Thursday, March 22, with a lecture by Kristin Henning, JD, juvenile justice expert and professor of law at Georgetown University. Henning will speak about “Overcriminalization of Normal Adolescent Development in Communities of Color and the Crisis in Indigent Juvenile.”

Henning’s lecture, part of the Public Interest Law & Policy Speakers Series, is co-sponsored by the law school’s Clinical Education Program, the Black Law Students Association and the American Constitution Society.

Program events continue from 1:15-5 p.m. March 22 with the conference “Liddell is 40: Commemorating the Desegregation Movement in St. Louis and a Look at the Future of Urban Education.”

The conference will cover topics such as segregation in St. Louis, the history of Liddell litigation and the failure of federal education initiatives.

To view a complete list of conference topics and speakers and to RSVP, visit http://law.wustl.edu/events/pages.aspx?id=9076.

On Friday, March 23, the Youth Justice Program concludes with the 12th annual Access to Equal Justice Colloquium sponsored by the Clinical Education Program on “Evolving Standards in Juvenile Justice: From Gault to Graham and Beyond,” from 8 a.m.-5 p.m.

The colloquium will cover topics such as the past, present and future of juvenile court practices, adolescent development issues, and the disproportionate representation of minority youth in adult prisons.

Colloquium co-sponsors are the law school’s Juvenile Rights and Re-Entry Project – Civil Justice Clinic, the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office, the Gephardt Institute for Public Service and the National Juvenile Defender Center.

To view a complete list of topics and speakers and to RSVP, visit: http://law.wustl.edu/accessequaljustice/.

Study looks at impact of neighborhood, family environments on Latino youth violence

Jessica Martin — 2012-03-09 00:00:00

Research has shown that youth violence is a major cause of injury and death among Latinos. However, there is little understanding of violent behaviors of youths within various Latino ethnic subgroups such as Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Mexicans.

Lorena Estrada-Martínez, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, recently examined how family dynamics and neighborhood racial/ethnic composition and socioeconomic status (SES) impact youth violence among Latino subgroups.

Estrada-Martínez

“Higher levels of youth independence can reduce the risk of violence in primarily Latino neighborhoods,” Estrada-Martínez says. “When we looked at the interaction between SES and autonomy, it was a different story. We found that as the SES of a neighborhood increases, high levels of autonomy became a risk factor for youth violence.

“As Latino families transition to more middle-class neighborhoods, parental control becomes more important.”

Estrada-Martínez says this study underscores how grouping nationalities within pan-ethnic labels may obscure differences and hinder effective interventions necessary to address violence among Latino youth.

National estimates generally indicate that the risk for violence among Latino youth falls between the risk for white and black youth.

“The level of youth violence for the different Latino subgroups depends on their neighborhood context,” Estrada-Martínez says.

“As an example, Puerto Ricans, who have been previously found to have the highest risk of violence among the Latino subgroups, only had higher risk for violence in ethnically mixed neighborhoods compared with whites, and in primarily Latino neighborhoods compared with other Latino youths.”

Estrada-Martínez used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, an ethnically diverse sample of youth, for her study, “Families, Neighborhood Socio-Demographic Factors, and Violent Behaviors among Latino, White, and Black Adolescents,” published in the journal Youth & Society.

She found that violence among Cuban youth does not differ from that of white youth overall, and these patterns hold for comparisons within predominantly white and ethnically mixed neighborhoods.

Risks for violence among Mexican youth are heightened in predominantly white and ethnically mixed neighborhoods, compared with white youth in those same environments.

“Within predominantly Latino neighborhoods, Mexican youth do not differ significantly in risk compared to Cuban youth,” Estrada-Martínez says.

Study findings suggest that Mexican and Cuban youth living in primarily Latino neighborhoods may be living in ethnic-specific communities.

“Our research suggests that ethnic enclaves may exert a protective effect against youth violence,” she says.

“Puerto Rican youth in this study are more likely to live in neighborhoods with a more racially and ethnically heterogeneous population. Consequently, the protections ethnic enclaves afford to Cuban and Mexican youth may be less readily available to Puerto Rican youth.”

Reducing risk

This study suggests a number of potential points of intervention for reducing risk among Latino adolescents.

“It’s important to consider ethnic subgroups and neighborhood contexts when developing these interventions,” Estrada-Martínez says.

Estrada-Martínez and coauthors suggest focusing resources on interventions that strengthen family cohesion and provide support for parents, particularly those who may have reduced access to support from other adults, and those transitioning to neighborhoods with higher levels of SES, who may begin to be exposed to a number of stressors through acculturation processes.

Estrada-Martínez presented this study at the Critical Research Issues on Latino Mental Health conference.

Her study coauthors are Cleopatra Howard Caldwell, PhD, associate professor of health behavior and health education; Amy J. Schulz, PhD, professor of health behavior and health education; Ana V. Diez-Roux, MD, PhD, professor of epidemiology, and Silvia Pedraza, PhD, professor of sociology and American culture, all at the University of Michigan.

Social Security’s ‘Chained COLA’ not ready for prime time

Jessica Martin — 2012-03-14 00:00:00

Social Security’s cost of living adjustments (COLA) are designed to protect against the erosion of retiree purchasing power when prices go up, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

“Now Social Security self-styled ‘reformers’ seek to lower COLA every year based on their claim that COLA overstates inflation,” says Merton C. Bernstein, LLB, a nationally recognized expert on Social Security.

The proposed substitute for the current CPI formula, ‘Chained COLA,’ is based on the assumption that benefit recipients substitute lower-priced goods as prices go up.

Bernstein

“This the assumption is unrealistic for those millions who only have access to convenience stores that typically offer fewer choice and higher prices,” says Bernstein, the Walter D. Coles Professor Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. “And, further, it is not reasonable to assume that most consumers can outwit the wiles of merchandising experts.”

Bernstein says that it takes two years to determine the data on which to base chained COLA, making it unsuitable for offsetting price increases that occur all the time.

“To adapt chained COLA to handle such a task would be either impossible or, if feasible at all, more costly to do so,” he says.

Impact on the wallet

Social Security actuaries calculate that a chained COLA would be .03 percent lower each year than the benefits projected under existing arrangements.

“This may seem miniscule for those with current job earnings and multiple sources of income, but benefits now are extremely modest — on average, about $1,100 a month,” Bernstein says.

“Moreover, under the present structure, COLA still chronically lags behind prices.

“COLA becomes operative when prices measured in the fall exceed the corresponding prices in the preceding fall. That percentage is applied to each beneficiary’s benefit for the next year starting in January. In consequence, Social Security COLA does not offset price increases when they occur. And it does not offset prices increases that take place during the year it is operative.”

Bernstein discusses the new COLA proposal in his recent Huffington Post article, “Proposed Social Security Chained COLA Not Ready for Prime Time.”

Minneapolis Fed president to speak on monetary policy limits March 20

Neil Schoenherr — 2012-03-15 00:00:00

Narayana Kocherlakota, PhD, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, will present “On the Limits to Monetary Policy” for the second-annual Hyman P. Minksy Lecture at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 20 in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom in Anheuser-Busch Hall.

Kocherlakota

Co-sponsored by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy and the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences, the lecture is free and open to the public.

Kocherlakota will draw upon his expertise and research in monetary economics, asset pricing and public finance.

Kocherlakota became the 12th president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis on Oct. 8, 2009.

As president, Kocherlakota serves on the Federal Open Market Committee (FMOC), the policymaking arm of the Federal Reserve System, consisting of the presidents of the 12 Federal Reserve banks and the members of the Board of Governors.

The FOMC meets every six to eight weeks in Washington, D.C, to determine monetary policy for the nation.

In addition to participation in monetary policymaking, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis supervises numerous banking organizations and provides a variety of payments services to financial institutions and the U.S. government.

Prior to becoming president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Kocherlakota was a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota, where he previously chaired the economics department, and a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

He also was a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

From 1996-98, he was a research staff member at the Minneapolis Fed.

Kocherlakota earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1987.

For more information or to register for the event, contact Melinda Warren at (314) 935-5652 or warren@wustl.edu.

Louis Sullivan to lead health-care forum

2012-03-14 00:00:00

Louis W. Sullivan, MD, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in the administration of President George H. W. Bush and president emeritus of the Morehouse School of Medicine, will lead a public forum on the future of health care at 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 11, at the Eric P. Newman Education Center, 320 S. Euclid Ave., at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The event is sponsored by the Center for Community Health & Partnerships at the Institute for Public Health; Division of Medical Education in the Department of Internal Medicine; the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy; and the Brown School.

Doors will open at 3:30 p.m.

For more information or to register, go to http://publichealth.wustl.edu/news/newsroom/Pages/LouisWSullivanevent.aspx.

Medical ethicists confront cancer in new book

Timothy Fox — 2012-03-02 00:00:00

Despite her own personal battle, Rebecca Dresser doesn’t view herself as a cancer “survivor.”

“Many people who have faced the disease are very courageous, but, in terms of defeating cancer, really, we were just lucky,” says Dresser, JD, the Daniel Noyes Kirby Professor of Law and professor of ethics at the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.

Dresser, editor of and contributor to a new book on medical ethics and cancer, was diagnosed with head and neck cancer six years ago. While she has written and taught extensively about the legal and ethical dimensions of a variety of medical topics, personally enduring intense radiation and chemotherapy treatments spurred her interest in the ethics of cancer and cancer care medicine.

For perspective, she reached out to other medical ethicists who had either had cancer themselves or had a spouse diagnosed with the disease. One of them had experienced both.

The group met twice at Washington University. Those meetings were tape-recorded and then transcribed. The transcript became the basis for their book, Malignant: Medical Ethicists Confront Cancer, published by Oxford University Press.

In an essay published in the Hastings Center Report, Dresser also reviewed six themes that surfaced as she and the other members of the group talked and wrote about their experiences.

“Cancer patients and caregivers operate in crisis mode,” Dresser writes. “Cancer knocked us off our feet. We were disoriented and unsure how to proceed.”

In that vulnerable state, cancer patients and their families sometimes make decisions that caregivers and others don’t understand. “Before facing cancer, we didn’t fully appreciate the psychology of patient decision-making,” she says.

Complicating things further, the many treatment options available — with their side effects and uncertain outcomes — often confuse cancer patients and their families.

Combined with the pressure to act quickly, patients may take a “leap of faith” when selecting treatment options.

As Dresser notes, “We now have a better sense of the real obstacles patients encounter in trying to make informed medical decisions.”

Patients in the group become painfully aware that they have given up a good deal of autonomy to the disease and those working to defeat it. “Despite being privileged patients with good health insurance and insider status, we were at the mercy of an overburdened and highly imperfect health-care system,” she writes.

Another theme that emerged was how seemingly mundane decisions on the part of health-care providers took on ethical dimensions. Does the doctor make eye contact when describing a treatment’s risks and side effects? Does he or she listen and respond when patients complain about those side effects? These seemingly minor behaviors take on an added dimension when the stakes are life and death.

Of course, not every patient responds to the disease in the same way; each patient brings to the table his or her own medical histories, tolerance for pain or discomfort, and past experiences with the medical establishment. Medical professionals need to be willing to adapt to meet the needs of each patient.

Finally, there is also considerable variation in how ordinary people and family members react to patients. While some are incredibly helpful and understanding, “a fair number of them have no idea how to behave toward seriously ill patients and their families,” Dresser writes. Reactions by these people range from denial to simply ignoring the patient.

“Death and dying may have a bigger public presence than they once did, but too many people remain ill-equipped to respond when serious illness strikes someone they know,” Dresser writes.

“Malignant intends to begin a conversation about the ethics of illness in everyday life. We hope it will encourage colleagues to turn their attention to this neglected topic.”

Another, broader response Dresser hopes her book will have is to raise the possibility of practicing “first-person bioethics.” While bioethics typically strives to be objective and dispassionate, facing the grim reality of a disease like cancer can make even the most analytical academic confront the fact that he or she is ultimately at the mercy of the medical establishment and a good portion of “luck.”

“Bioethics operates in the shadow of death,” Dresser writes. “A bioethics that fails to recognize and respond to the experience of illness will have limited value for patients and their families.”

A prolific author, Dresser has written and or co-written numerous articles and three other books: Bioethics and Law: Cases, Materials and Problems; When Science Offers Salvation: Patient Advocacy and Research Ethics; and The Human Use of Animals: Case Studies in Ethical Choice.

Global influence of U.S. Constitution on the decline, study reveals

2012-02-21 00:00:00

The U.S. Constitution’s global influence is on the decline, finds a new study by David S. Law, JD, PhD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Other countries are increasingly turning to sources other than the U.S. Constitution for guidance in establishing human rights provisions and for general structural provisions in creating their constitutions,” he says.

Law

Law, with co-author Mila Versteeg, DPhil, associate professor of law at the University of Virginia, analyzed 60 years of data on the content of the world’s constitutions.

“The data revealed that there is a significant and growing generic component to global constitutionalism, in the form of a set of rights provisions that appear in nearly all formal constitutions,” Law says.

“Our analysis also confirms, however, that the U.S. Constitution is becoming increasingly out of sync with these global practices.”
Their research, which examined 729 constitutions adopted by 188 different countries from 1946-2006, also found little emulation of the constitutions of Germany, South Africa and India.

Similarly, no particular treaty or international human rights instrument stands out as an overall model. However, they did note links between constitution-making in other countries and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, although the tie-in was not uniform.

Law and Versteeg found that the constitutions of non-democratic countries tend to exhibit relatively greater similarity to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, while those of common law countries exhibit the opposite tendency.

“It is difficult to infer from these patterns, however, that countries have actually emulated international or regional human rights instruments when writing their constitutions,” Law says.

Law notes that the article does not stake a position about whether it is a good or a bad thing that other countries do or do not use the U.S. Constitution as a model, or whether the United States itself is in fact losing some form of international influence.

“Some people have questioned whether we had an ideological agenda in writing this article, but our reasons for writing it were straightforward and not at all sinister,” Law says.

“We had a previous study that identified trends in the global evolution of constitutionalism, and a logical next question to ask was whether the U.S. Constitution was at the forefront of that evolution,” he says.

“We also thought that people would be interested in the answer to this question, and we hoped to demonstrate that empirical scholarship in the area of constitutional law, which remains extremely rare, can be of interest to a wider audience.”

Law says newer constitutions are part of a “polycentric evolutionary process” that does not favor modeling based on a “specimen that is frozen in time.”

“If the United States were to revise the Bill of Rights today — with the benefit of over two centuries of experience, and, in a manner that addresses contemporary challenges while remaining faithful to the nation’s best traditions — there is no guarantee that other countries would follow its lead.

“But the world would surely pay close attention,” Law says.
Law and Versteeg’s article, “The Declining Influence of the United States Constitution,” will appear in the New York University Law Review.

The authors’ forthcoming research will look at which countries are guilty of having sham constitutions.

“We couldn’t agree more with the quotation from Justice (Antonin) Scalia in The New York Times article that some constitutions are not worth the paper they are written on,” Law says.

“This is a question we have been thinking about for some time,” he says, “and we think we now have something original and empirical to say about it — beyond merely repeating the obvious point that some constitutions are sham constitutions.”

Work & Livable Lives Conference Feb. 27 and 28

2012-02-15 00:00:00

Washington University in St. Louis will host the “Work & Livable Lives Conference” Feb. 27 and 28 to address current employment-related challenges and how they limit the ability of U.S. households to lead secure and stable lives, raise children successfully, and contribute to the community.

“The conference will not only focus on problems, but also on constructive solutions, exploring policy approaches to employment supports, health care, and job creation,” says Michael Sherraden, PhD, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development and director of the Brown School’s Center for Social Development, one of the sponsors of the conference.

The conference will include panels on household financial fragility, measurement of economic security, the American Dream, labor and employment policy, and health policy and employment.

Jared Bernstein, PhD, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former chief economist and economic policy adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden, will deliver the conference keynote address, “Rebuilding an Opportunity Society: The Roles of Policy and Power,” at 4:30 p.m. Feb. 27. A reception will follow Bernstein’s speech.

All conference events will be held in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom of Anheuser-Busch Hall and are free and open to the public. A complete schedule of events is available at http://law.wustl.edu/centeris/pages.aspx?id=9009.

“With persistently high unemployment and underemployment — and growing inequality in wages — an increasing number of American families are no longer adequately supported by employment income and basic benefits,” says Marion Crain, JD, the Wiley B. Rutledge Professor of Law and director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Work & Social Capital at the School of Law, which co-sponsors the conference.

“Many older workers have ‘retired’ before they are ready, and many young workers cannot find a foothold in the job market,” she says. “A silent crisis is under way, with huge social and economic costs for the nation.”

Other WUSTL conference sponsors are the Center for New Institutional Social Sciences; the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy; the American Culture Studies department in Arts & Sciences; and the Office of the Provost.

The conference is held in partnership with the Brown School Policy Forum at Washington University and the New America Foundation in Washington, DC.

This event is part of the university-wide Livable Lives Initiative, which investigates social conditions and policy supports that can make life with a low or moderate income stable, secure, satisfying and successful.

Twitter subpoenas a challenge to intellectual privacy

Jessica Martin — 2012-02-14 00:00:00

The City of New York recently subpoenaed a Twitter account as part of an ongoing Occupy Wall Street criminal case. The Occupy protester named in the case is challenging the subpoena.

Richards

Privacy law expert Neil Richards, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, says that it’s not surprising that law enforcement groups are interested in accessing the volume of records relating to our speech that social media platforms generate.

“By and large, this data should remain private, and online companies should keep the data confidential and not share it any more broadly than we as users and speakers want it to be shared,” Richards says.

“Records of our communications involve our intellectual privacy, and to allow the state to study our private thoughts and words is to allow monitoring of our civil liberties on an Orwellian scale.”

Richards says that U.S. law is somewhat protective of online communications, though the main line of defense comes not from the law but from the behavior of records holders like Google, Twitter, and Facebook.

He applauds companies like Twitter who resist handing broad swathes of intellectual data to the government. Mozilla and Google also have a good record of protecting the privacy and confidentiality of their users.

“In our digital world, the battles for civil liberties are increasingly being fought on the front lines of social media, and social media companies are our first line of defense against the kind of Big Brother-style surveillance our traditions reject,” Richards says.

“In the absence of stronger laws, the positions these companies take have a real impact on the practical state of our civil liberties. I’m very glad that Twitter is siding with its users as citizens in these debates rather than the government.”

The full subpoena is available at www.scribd.com/doc/79940746/Subpoena-on-destructuremal.

Public attitudes toward federal spending, taxes deeply divided, new poll finds

Neil Schoenherr — 2012-02-17 00:00:00

The American public exhibits deep partisan divisions about the direction that federal fiscal policy should take, finds a new national survey from Washington University in St. Louis.

The American Panel Survey, which monthly polls the same group of 2,000 citizens, finds in its debut January survey that prospective voters for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney differ widely in preferences for spending and taxes, although both groups favor increasing taxes on high-income households.

Respondents were asked whether spending or taxes in each of several categories should increase, stay the same or decrease. The results, illustrated in the following graphs, show a stark contrast between likely voters for Obama and Romney in a two-way race.

The first figure below shows how sharply polarized the two camps of panelists are across most domestic programs. With the exceptions of Social Security and veterans health programs, the balance of pro-Obama respondents favor more spending and the balance of pro-Romney respondents favor less spending.

On defense, the balance of pro-Obama respondents favor less spending and the balance of pro-Romney respondents favor more spending.

The second figure illustrates the differences between partisan groups in their positions on taxation. The balance of opinion in both camps supports tax increases for high-income households. The camps differ in their position on corporate and capital gains taxes.

The American Panel Survey (TAPS) is based on a national probability sample. It launched last fall and the January results are its first publicly released findings. As a panel, the survey returns to the same respondents each month, which allows for measuring change in attitudes among individuals over time and results in the accumulation of more data about the respondents than in most surveys.

The typical monthly survey includes about 1,600 respondents from a larger panel of 2,100.

TAPS is a project of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis. The survey is implemented by Knowledge Networks of Palo Alto, Calif.

For more information on the project or other data from this month’s survey, email Steven S. Smith, PhD, the Kate M. Gregg Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences and director of the Weidenbaum Center, at taps@wustl.edu.

More information about TAPS is available at taps.wustl.edu.

Gephardt Institute names faculty scholars in community-based teaching and learning

2012-02-14 00:00:00

The Gephardt Institute for Public Service at Washington University in St. Louis has announced faculty scholars receiving Innovation Grants for Community-Based Teaching and Learning.

Community-based teaching and learning, also known as service-learning, is a pedagogy that is growing across all disciplines. These courses are distinguished by learning activities in service to an organization or community, course content and assignments connected to the service, and faculty oversight.

The grants provide faculty members with financial support for curriculum development and implementation. Faculty scholars join previous grant recipients in a cohort that meets to discuss common challenges and share successful strategies in community-based teaching and learning.

The Gephardt Institute also offers technical expertise to faculty in key areas of community-based teaching and learning such as assignments reflecting on service, evaluation methods and tools for working effectively with community partners.

Faculty recipients for 2011-12 are:

Forrest Fulton, visiting assistant professor of architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Students in “City Studio Design-Build at Patrick Henry School in Columbus Square” will work with the school and community to strengthen the design of a shared garden.

John Trelawney Hoal, PhD, associate professor of architecture and chair of the Master of Urban Design Program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Students will work with members of the Forest Park Southeast neighborhood to create an overarching sustainability plan through the course “Contemporary Practices of Sustainable Urbanism.”

Ignacio Infante, PhD, assistant professor of comparative literature in Arts & Sciences. Students in the “World-wide Translation: Language, Culture, Technology” course will engage with community partners by providing a variety of translation services.

Glenn Davis Stone, PhD, professor of sociocultural anthropology and of environmental studies, both in Arts & Sciences. Through the “Village India Program,” students will teach lessons at Pai Junior College in Andhra Pradesh, India, and participate in other village activities.

Karen Tokarz, JD, the Charles Nagel Professor of Public Interest Law & Public Service, director, Civil Rights and Community Justice Clinic, and director, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution Program in the School of Law; and C.J. Larkin, JD, administrative director of the Negotiation and Dispute Resolution Program and lecturer in law. The grant will support students in “Civil Rights & Community Justice Clinic” to develop informational community resources.

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program in Arts & Sciences. A departmental grant will support a range of community-based courses taught by Jami Ake, PhD, assistant dean in the College of Arts & Sciences; Barbara Baumgartner, PhD, senior lecturer, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program; Amy Eisen Cislo, PhD, interim associate director and lecturer, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program; and Susan Stiritz, PhD, senior lecturer, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.

For more information about community-based teaching and learning at Washington University, visit gephardtinstitute.wustl.edu/CBTL .

Wrighton comments on Obama’s 2013 budget proposal

2012-02-13 00:00:00

Washington University in St. Louis Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton issued a statement Feb. 13 following the release of President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for 2013 in which Wrighton noted the importance of our nation’s continued investment in scientific research.

Wrighton

Wrighton’s statement:

“The president’s budget recognizes the importance of funding for the kinds of basic scientific research that is carried out at great American research universities like Washington University in St. Louis. Especially in the midst of a challenging fiscal environment, I appreciate that the president has chosen to maintain our nation’s investment in scientific research.

“In the last fiscal year, the talented scholars, scientists and physicians at Washington University successfully competed for more than $600 million in research funding. More than $450 million of that was from federal sources, like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“These awards allow our scientists to make important discoveries that encourage innovation and ultimately lead to better patient care, efficient energy sources, and new companies and products while at the same time preparing our students to be the workforce we need to remain competitive in this increasingly global economy.

“At Washington University, we are proud of the contributions we have made toward solving some of the most difficult issues facing our country. In the world of medicine, we have made great strides in recent years in confronting diseases such as cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s, and we have helped lead the way in addressing some of the St. Louis community’s most pressing health issues, like obesity and the health disparities that exist between racial groups.

“Additionally, federal funding for research in areas like biology, chemistry and engineering is helping make America’s energy future more independent, sustainable and safe. Given below are just four examples of federally funded research at Washington University that have the potential to improve the lives of all Americans and advance our scientific understanding.

“The president’s budget will now be shaped by Congress and there are areas, like the NIH, that require increased funding to ensure continued U.S. leadership. I strongly encourage all members of Congress to support scientific research as a key national investment in our future.”

Federally funded research examples at Washington University

Cancer genomics — a path toward personalized medicine

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine are playing a leading role in an effort to understand the genetic basis of cancer. By decoding the genomes of cancer patients and the genomes of their tumor cells, and comparing the genetic sequences side-by-side, they can identify the unique genetic changes at the root of a patient’s cancer. This research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, has laid the foundation for applying a more personalized approach to cancer treatment. Rather than base treatment decisions on where cancer is located in the body, doctors conceivably could select therapies based on the underlying genetic defects in a patient’s tumor. To date, our scientists have sequenced the genomes of hundreds of cancer patients, which has allowed them to identify novel cancer mutations that are improving the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Alzheimer’s disease — improving early diagnosis, treatment

Scientists now think that Alzheimer’s begins to ravage the brain 10 to 20 years before signs of dementia develop. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine are exploring multiple avenues to detect the disease in its earliest stages and treat it before a patient’s memory deteriorates. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, they are leading an international collaboration to understand inherited forms of the disease, caused by mutations in key genes. As part of this collaboration, Washington University investigators soon will begin clinical trials of drugs designed to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Patients enrolled in the trial won’t have Alzheimer’s symptoms but will have inherited genetic mutations that make it certain they will develop the disease, often at a young age. If the drugs can slow or prevent Alzheimer’s in these patients, they could then be evaluated in others at risk of developing the disease.

Energy independence — making solar energy more efficient

An interdisciplinary group of Washington University science and engineering researchers, along with several other select scientists from academia, private research institutes and national laboratories, are working together to understand the basic scientific principles that govern solar energy collection by photosynthetic organisms, which use structures called antennae to collect and funnel light energy to reaction centers where it can be fixed in a more permanent form. Funded by the Department of Energy, the team plans to use this knowledge to enhance natural antenna systems and to fabricate biohybrid and bioinspired systems for light-harvesting. The overriding goal is to open the path to simple, robust light-harvesting systems with efficiencies equal to or better than the native photosynthetic antenna and that will contribute to revolutionary advances in artificial systems for solar-energy conversion.

Planetary research — exploring the global habitability of planets

Washington University’s Earth and Planetary Remote Sensing Laboratory directed by Ray Arvidson,

PhD, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences, focuses on the surface processes and histories of Earth, Mars and Venus. Laboratory personnel have been or are involved in NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, Odyssey, Mars Exploration Rover, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Phoenix Mars Lander, and Mars Science Laboratory missions. The laboratory also participated in the Magellan mission to Venus and the 2008 NASA Mars Phoenix Lander mission. The laboratory’s mission is defining the global habitability of planets, with a current focus on Mars and past and present conditions that may have been suitable for the development and evolution of life. As the home of the Geosciences Node of the NASA Planetary Data System, the laboratory is responsible for curating and archiving data from planetary space missions. This data is available for public access through the node. Students are also actively involved in the laboratory as a part of innovative undergraduate courses such as the Pathfinder Program in Environmental Sustainability, in which multidisciplinary approaches to environmental problems are stressed.

New book explores forgotten freedom of assembly

Jessica Martin — 2012-02-02 00:00:00

Freedom of assembly has become the forgotten constitutional right, with courts’ attention focused more on freedoms of association and speech.

Both the Occupy and Tea Party movements, however, are reminders of how the right to assemble has been “at the heart of some of the most important social movements in American history: antebellum abolitionism, women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement,” says John Inazu, JD, PhD, associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.

“The right of assembly protects the members of a group based not upon their principles or politics but by virtue of their coming together in a way of life.”

In his new book, Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly, recently published by Yale University Press, Inazu examines why freedom of assembly has become “a historical footnote in American law and political theory,” and what has been lost with the weakening of protections for private groups.

“Claims of assembly stood against the ideological tyranny that exploded during the first Red Scare in the years surrounding the First World War and the Second Red Scare of 1950s’ McCarthyism,” he says.

http://youtu.be/SvNQSuLTzv4John Inazu, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, discusses the forgotten right of assembly — a right that has been “at the heart of some of the most important social movements in American history.”
“By losing touch with our past recognition of the freedom of assembly and the groups that have been embodied it,” Inazu argues, “we cede to the state the authority over what kinds of groups are acceptable in the democratic experiment.”

Inazu says that the right to assemble could begin to return to its earlier prominence through constitutional litigation.

His current research looks at freedom of assembly in the digital space.

For more information and to read the book visit: http://law.wustl.edu/faculty_profiles/inazu/?page_id=36

New book examines impact of U.S. tobacco industry

Jessica Daues — 2012-02-08 00:00:00

Princeton University Press

For a hi-res image, click here.

Most research that focuses on tobacco examines health risks associated with smoking, says Peter Benson, PhD, a sociocultural anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

What has been neglected is research on tobacco production in the United States, and specifically on the people who work and live in the rural, traditional tobacco-growing areas of North Carolina.

Benson’s new book, Tobacco Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2011), examines the impact of the transformation of the tobacco industry on farmers, workers and the American public. It reveals public health threats, the impact of off-shoring, and the immigration issues related to tobacco production.

The book also examines the new public relations strategies of the tobacco industry and its recent corporate social responsibility “makeover”.

“There are whole groups of people — farmers and farm workers — in our society who dedicate themselves to growing a crop that is vilified,” says Benson, assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences.

“But this book is not just about good people doing a bad thing. What I found was, in going to North Carolina and going to these farms, that the story becomes much more complex.”

http://youtu.be/drG-hTDzJmo

Pressure on farmers and questions of identity

Tobacco farms often go back generations. A father’s father’s father farmed land still owned by his great-grandson.

Tobacco farmers take great pride in their family’s history and role in tobacco production, Benson says.

But like many other American industries, tobacco companies are increasingly purchasing their products overseas, buying more tobacco leaves from farmers in places like Brazil and fewer from farmers in North Carolina, Benson says.

“Tobacco is cheaper to produce in developing countries because the labor costs are lower and there are less stringent environmental and labor laws,” Benson says.

Not only is less American tobacco leaf being bought by tobacco companies, but also what is purchased from U.S. farmers is bought at increasingly lowered prices to compete with overseas farms.

As their relationship with tobacco companies deteriorates, tobacco farmers also face public derision and sometimes internal ambivalence about growing what is widely seen as a dangerous product.

Off-shoring. Lowered prices. Negative public perception. With all these issues swirling, many tobacco farmers see their livelihood and family heritage — their identity — as under attack from many sides.

“Tobacco growers in North Carolina are understandably distressed,” Benson says. “And there’s hardly any relief from a public that often sees smoking, and I think rightly so, as something that ought not exist.”

Public health risks and immigration issues

The public health effects of tobacco production go beyond the risk of tobacco use itself, Benson says. It also shows in the chronic vulnerability of the migrant workers who harvest it.

Many of the workers who harvest the tobacco crop are undocumented migrant farm workers from Mexico and Central America, Benson says. They live in “labor camps” of barracks-style housing, often dilapidated or poorly constructed.

“These are dangerous places to live,” Benson says. “Labor camp conditions for migrant farm workers are notoriously bad. There might be housing code violations, insect and rodent infestations, and, in the North Carolina summer, heat — intense, oppressive heat.

“They are living as a vulnerable population without resources, without access to certain things like health care, legal services and employment benefits,” Benson says. “And yet, they are there, going to Wal-Mart on Saturdays and Sundays, just like everybody else.”

With many farmers already feeling a sense of insecurity about their livelihood and identity, a change in their small, rural communities — such as an influx of immigrant workers — can lead to cultural tensions.

“Hiring undocumented workers to compete economically with cheaper foreign leaf challenges the cultural status of family farms as national icons,” Benson says. “It also puts tobacco farmers at the heart of contentious political debates in the U.S. about immigration.”

Tobacco company marketing strategies

Since the late 1990s, tobacco companies have undergone what Benson calls a “corporate social responsibility makeover,” shifting responsibility from the companies (for making a harmful product) to consumers (for supposedly choosing to use it) and claiming to create “safer” tobacco products.

“They are telling the public, ‘Look, we are a responsible corporate citizen. We make a risky product, yes, but it’s your choice to use it. You are a parent. Help your kids make good decisions.’

“They’ve rerouted responsibility for tobacco onto parents, convenience store clerks, police officers, people checking identification cards, so that tobacco and smoking seem to be a problem of bad parenting and the family, not an inherently harmful industry,” Benson says.

Tobacco companies also are promoting smokeless tobacco, electronic cigarettes and cigarettes with modified tobacco content as “safer” alternatives to cigarettes.

Problem is, there’s no such thing as safe tobacco use, Benson says, and people may be misled into thinking they are making a good choice by purchasing these “safer” products.

“The tobacco industry wants you to go to the convenience store, and instead of buying a pack of Nicorette gum because you want to quit cigarettes, it wants you to choose that reduced-risk tobacco product,” Benson says.

“Safe tobacco. Safe cigarette. Those words just don’t go together.”

Benson compares tobacco companies’ “safer” tobacco to pharmaceutical companies’ cholesterol-reducing drugs like Lipitor.

“If cholesterol is to be managed by Lipitor, and Lipitor is to be taken for your entire life, then that distracts attention, public health resources and political will from the idea that you can prevent high cholesterol in other ways — for example, by modifying the food system at much lower cost — but not to the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry,” Benson says.

Instead of managing the problem of disease through a narrow focus on the consumer, Benson says, Americans, as a society, should really examine the root causes of chronic disease, especially the role of powerful industries like tobacco.

For more information about the book Tobacco Capitalism, visit press.princeton.edu/titles/9612.html.

Could the GOP be headed for a brokered convention?

Jessica Martin — 2012-01-24 00:00:00

Three Republican primaries or caucuses have ended with three different winners. Upcoming state contests may make the Republican candidate picture clearer, but if division remains, the Grand Old Party could end up with a brokered convention.

“Most delegates selected through the primary and caucus process are committed to a particular candidate for the initial convention voting,” says Gregory P. Magarian, JD, election law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.

“If the process of voting based on delegates’ commitments does not produce a nominee, then something has to break the logjam. After the initial ballots, delegates are freed from their original commitments.

“The likeliest scenario is that one delegate will persuade another candidates’ delegates to switch their allegiance on a later ballot,” he says. “But more dramatic steps might conceivably happen, including the entry of a new candidate.”

A surprise candidate?

Magarian says that once delegates are free from their commitments, nothing would stop a new candidate from entering the fray and winning the nomination.

“In my view, this is extremely unlikely,” he says.

“A new candidate would risk alienating Republican voters, whose will would be subverted by the nomination of a new candidate. The new candidate would also not have run the gauntlet of the nominating process. That would be a problem for the general election, both practically and as a matter of voters’ perception. The candidate might get an initial novelty bounce in the polls, but ultimately, I doubt voters would elect a candidate whom they had only recently gotten to know.”

Magarian says this is especially true in this year’s GOP race, where none of the commonly cited alternatives — Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan — has ever run a national race.

Impact of the superdelegates

“The Republicans, like the Democrats, seat a large number of ‘superdelegates’ at the national convention,” Magarian says.

“The superdelegates, mostly party establishment figures, go in uncommitted, so their swing to one of the frontrunners could settle even a very close contest on the first ballot, effectively ‘brokering’ an unbrokered convention.”

Magarian notes that there are a lot of primaries and caucuses left in which one candidate is likely to gain traction. “Even the very close 2008 Democratic race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton led to a settled result before the national convention,” he says.

“But anything can happen.”

Study looks at how kids with autism spend their screen time

Jessica Martin — 2012-01-25 00:00:00

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) tend to be preoccupied with screen-based media. A new study by Paul Shattuck, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, looks at how children with ASDs spend their screen time.

“We found a very high rate of use of solitary screen-based media such as video games and television with a markedly lower rate of use of social interactive media, including email,” Shattuck says.

The study examined data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2 (NLTS2), a group of more than 1,000 adolescents enrolled in special education. The NLTS2 includes groups of adolescents with ASDs, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities and speech and language impairments.

Data revealed that nearly 60.3 percent of the youths with ASDs were reported to spend “most of his/her time” watching television or videos.

“This rate appears to be high, given that among typically developing adolescents, only 28 percent have been shown to be ‘high users’ of television,” Shattuck says.

“Television viewing is clearly a preferred activity for children with ASDs, regardless of symptoms, functional level or family status.”

Nearly half of the youth with ASDs in the study (41.4 percent) spent most of their free time (outside of school or work) playing video games.

“Given that only 18 percent of youths in the general population are considered to be high users of video games, it seems reasonable to infer based on the current results, that kids with ASDs are at significantly greater risk of high use of this media than are youths without ASDs,” Shattuck says.

Shattuck says that the high use of video games on children is concerning because it makes the youth unavailable for social interaction or learning.

Social media contrast

Study data show strikingly lower rates of use of email and social media among youth with ASDs.

“We found that 64.4 percent of youth with ASDs did not use email or chat at all,” Shattuck says.

“Kids with speech and language impairments and learning disabilities were about two times more likely to use email or chat rooms than those with ASDs.”

Shattuck says that as cognitive skills increased and children with ASDs grew older, use of social media increased.

“This proclivity for screen time might be turned into something we can take advantage of to enhance social skills and learning achievement, especially recent innovations in devices like iPads,” he says.

The study, “Prevalence and Correlates of Screen-Based Media Use Among Youths with Autism Spectrum Disorders,” is published in the current issue of the Journal of Autism Developmental Disorders.

Lead author on the study is Micah O. Mazurek, PhD, assistant professor of health psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Remaining authors are Shattuck; Mary Wagner, PhD, principal scientist at SRI International; and Benjamin Cooper, a data analyst at the Brown School.

The full study is available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/984812t131480547/.

Gehlert named senior fellow of the Society for Social Work and Research

Jessica Martin — 2012-01-25 00:00:00

Sarah Gehlert, PhD, the E. Desmond Lee Professor of Racial and Ethnic Diversity at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, was recently appointed senior fellow of the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR).

In her role, Gehlert will represent social work research to federal agencies and policy makers. She will meet with leaders of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and their related institutes and centers to discuss how ongoing and current social work research aligns with their missions.

Gehlert also will attend the public portions of National Advisory Council meetings at pertinent NIH institutes to comment on their plans from the standpoint of social work research.

Gehlert

Gehlert, a faculty member in the Department of Surgery at the School of Medicine, focuses her scholarship on social influences on health, especially the health of vulnerable populations.

She currently is working on the influence of neighborhood and community factors, such as community violence and unsafe housing, on psychosocial functioning among African-American women newly diagnosed with breast cancer, with an eye toward how these factors “get under the skin” to affect gene expression and tumorigenesis.

Gehlert is an editor for the Handbook of Health Social Work, Second Edition, a key resource for social workers, offering a comprehensive and evidence-based overview of social work practice in health care.

At WUSTL, Gehlert, a scholar in the Institute of Public Health, is co-program leader of the Prevention and Control Program of the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center; co-director of the Transdisciplinary Center on Energetics and Cancer (TREC); and training program director of the Program for the Elimination of Cancer Disparities (PECaD).

She serves on the executive committee of the university’s Institute for Clinical and Translational Science (a CTSA) and is co-chair of the Center for Community-Engaged Research.  

On a national level, Gehlert is a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH. She is co-chair of the Population Health Advisory Committee of the Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research at NIH.

Gehlert is a charter member of NIH’s Community-Level Health Promotion Scientific Review Panel and a member of the scientific review panel for Oncology Social Work at the American Cancer Society.

She is a fellow in the American Association of Social Work and Social Welfare. She also is past president of the Society for Social Work and Research and serves on the editorial boards of Health & Social Work, Social Work Research, Social Service Review, Research in Social Work Practice, and Oxford Bibliographies Online (Social Work).

SSWR is dedicated to the advancement of social work research. The organization works collaboratively with a number of other groups that are committed to improving support for research among social workers.

‘Public Education at a Crossroads’: Brown School, Teach for America co-sponsor panel discussion Jan. 26

2012-01-23 00:00:00

Teach For America-St. Louis and the Brown School Policy Forum at Washington University in St. Louis will host a panel discussion on “St. Louis Public Education at a Crossroads: The Outstanding Schools Act, Turner v. Clayton, and the Future,” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 26, in Brown Hall, Room 100.

The event will bring together Missouri legislators and education officials to discuss how Turner v. Clayton is impacting state legislation.

In Turner v. Clayton, a court ruled that the State of Missouri must enforce the Outstanding Schools Act, which states that students living in unaccredited districts may attend school at a neighboring accredited district at the expense of the unaccredited district. The decision, in favor of the Turner family, has since been appealed and is waiting to be heard again.

The case and resulting judicial or legislative action will have significant ramifications for many of the students in the St. Louis area.

Panelists are:

State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal ;
State Sen. Jane Cunningham ;
State Rep. Scott Diekhaus, chair, House Committee on Elementary and Secondary Education;
State Rep. Tishaura Jones ;
Chris Nicastro, commissioner of education for the State of Missouri ; and
Don Senti, executive director, Cooperating School Districts.

Kimberly Jade Norwood, JD, professor of law at WUSTL, will serve as moderator.

Register for the event at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dE0wTGVDT2lQOUpLdkNtQ0pzSW92cVE6MQ#gid=0.

For more information contact, Lisa Clancy, coordinator of alumni affairs at Teach For America-St. Louis (lisa.clancy@teachforamerica.org) or Susan Stepleton, director of the Brown School Policy Forum (sstepleton@brownschool.wustl.edu).

Work, Families and Public Policy series continues Jan. 23

Jessica Martin — 2012-01-18 00:00:00

Faculty and graduate students from St. Louis-area universities with an interest in labor, households, health care, law and social welfare are invited to take part in a series of Monday brown-bag luncheon seminars to be held biweekly on the Danforth Campus at Washington University in St. Louis beginning Monday, Jan. 23, through Monday, April 16.

In its 16th year, the Work, Families and Public Policy series features one-hour presentations on research interests of faculty from local and national universities. The series is designed to promote interdisciplinary research.

Presentations will be from noon-1 p.m. in Seigle Hall, Room 348.

The series continues Monday, Jan. 23, with a lecture by Kelly Bishop, PhD, assistant professor of economics in Arts & Sciences, on “Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets: Estimating Marginal Willingness to Pay for Differentiated Products without Instrumental Variables.”

The remaining presentations are:

Feb. 6. Donna K. Ginther, PhD, professor of economics at the University of Kansas, on “The Diversity of NIH Research Awardees in Academic Medicine”;

Feb. 20. Maria E. Canon, PhD, economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, on “The Role of Schools in the Production of Achievement”;

March 5. V. Joseph Hotz, PhD, the Arts & Sciences Professor of Economics at Duke University, on “The Family that Shares is the Family that Cares: Are Extended Families Efficient in their Sharing?”;

March 19. Duncan Thomas, PhD, professor of economics and global health at Duke University, on “Decision-Making by Households and Families”;

April 2. Kimberly D. Krawiec, JD, the Kathrine Robinson Everett Professor of Law at Duke University, on “Kidneys Without Contracts: The Legal And Ethical Implications of NEAD Chain Bridge Donor Contracts”;

April 16. Sandra E. Black, PhD, professor of economics at the University of Texas, on “Does Money Matter? The Effect of Child Care Subsidies on Academic Performance.”

Robert A. Pollak, PhD, the Hernreich Distinguished Professor of Economics in Arts & Sciences and in the Olin Business School, has been the lead organizer of the series for the past 15 years.

Co-organizer is Michael Sherraden, PhD, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School at WUSTL.

The series is sponsored by the Olin Business School; the Brown School and the Center for Social Development; the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Work and Social Capital in the School of Law; the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences; the College of Arts & Sciences; and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The classroom is courtesy of the Department of Economics.

For more information, contact Pollak at (314) 935-4918 or pollak@wustl.edu; Sherraden at (314) 935-6691 or at sherrad@wustl.edu; or visit olin.wustl.edu/Events/Pages/default.aspx and search for the seminar by date.

SOPA, PROTECT IP will stifle creativity and diminish free speech, say WUSTL experts

Jessica Martin — 2012-01-17 00:00:00

Wikipedia and other sites plan to go dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act under consideration in Congress. Three law professors from Washington University in St. Louis, Kevin Collins, Gregory Magarian and Neil Richards, signed a letter to Congress in opposition to the PROTECT IP Act. Below are Magarian and Richards’ current comments on SOPA and PROTECT IP.

Gregory P. Magarian, JD, constitutional law and free speech expert, says that PROTECT IP Act and SOPA are to intellectual property what the infamous Communications Decency Act was to “indecent” online material – an incredibly powerful, blunt instrument that would drastically diminish free speech in the name of protecting copyrights.

Magarian

“The proposed statutes use vaguely phrased standards for determining the identity of infringing websites, and they would allow the government to bar transactions with, and even links to, cites that it finds to infringe,” he says.

“A search engine could violate the law simply by returning the name of an ‘infringing’ site in a search. This is akin to punishing a publisher who prepares a list of names and addresses of purveyors of obscene materials. It is a frightening and far-reaching form of thought control.

“The proposed statutes continue and exacerbate the trend of wealthy copyright holders’ prevailing on Congress to inflate copyright protection beyond any reasonable construction of the Constitution’s Copyright Clause, without regard to the public’s interest in access to information.”

Neil Richards, JD, First Amendment and privacy law expert, says that both SOPA and the Protect IP Act are unnecessary to protect copyrighted media from unfair uses.

“Copyright holders already have substantial powers under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other statutes, and new copyrights granted today can last for a century or more, at the expense of the vibrant public domain that makes any creativity possible,” he says.

Richards

“At a time when our copyright law is over-protective in both duration and scope, stifling creativity by individuals, we need less protection for copyrighted works, and not more. The sheer amount of lobbying money that the copyright industries have been able to dump into the political process on this issue is testament both to their corporate profitability and their greed.”

More importantly, Richards notes, the means that these bills would give government to protect copyright holders are unprecedented in scope, giving them the power to break the Internet in pursuit of little more than extra profit.

“These powers are inconsistent with our historic commitments to the free exchange of information and ideas, they threaten First Amendment values, and they are certainly unconstitutional as they currently drafted,” Richards says.

“These values of free expression are coded into the current structure of the Internet, and SOPA and the Protect-IP Act would try to change the nature of the Internet, making it closed rather than open. Given this reality, it should be no surprise that virtually all of the big Internet companies have come out in opposition to these terrible bills.”

Hosanna-Tabor an important victory for religious liberty

2012-01-12 00:00:00

The U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Hosanna-Tabor v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is an important victory for religious liberty says First Amendment expert John Inazu, JD, associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.

The case pitted the freedom of a church to select its own leaders against a terminated employee’s ability to bring a disability discrimination claim.

“Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion for the Court made clear that both the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses ‘bar the government from interfering with the decision of a religious group to fire one of its ministers,’” Inazu says.

“A church cannot be made ‘to accept or retain an unwanted minister’ because doing so ‘interferes with the internal governance of the church, depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs.’”

Inazu says the case is significant for at least three reasons.

“First, it entrenches the ministerial exception -- which the lower courts have recognized for four decades,” he says.

“Second, it applies the exception to an employee who worked beyond the four corners a church, in this case, to a school operated by the church. Third, it applies the exception based on an overall assessment of the employee’s role, based in part on the church’s understanding of that role.”

“This third point is worth underscoring: it signifies a kind of institutional deference that cannot be reduced to rote formula. Each of these three assertions provides vital protections for religious groups whose freedoms have been threatened by the Court’s 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith and its 2010 decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.”

Employment Division v. Smith limited the protections of the free exercise clause against generally applicable laws like employment discrimination laws. Christian Legal Society v. Martinez folded the claims to freedom of religious association into a less protective speech framework.

“In light of Smith and Martinez, Hosanna-Tabor is a welcome reminder that the Court has not lost sight of ‘the text of the First Amendment itself, which gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations.’”

Global climate change: Ralph Cicerone joins WUSTL conversation

2012-01-12 00:00:00

Brian Wilson

Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, delivering the Princeton Environmental Institute’s 2011 Taplin Environmental Lecture.

Ralph J. Cicerone, PhD, president of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the National Research Council, will present a seminar on climate change at Washington University in St. Louis at 4 p.m. Monday, Jan. 23, in Room 300, Laboratory Sciences Building on the Danforth Campus.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton will introduce him.

The seminar, "Global Climate Change and Demand for Energy," is part of a conversation about climate change that began last October when a small group of faculty gathered in the new International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES) conference room in Green Hall to brainstorm ways to put the entire weight of the WUSTL community behind efforts to address climate change.

"Contemporary climate change is seen in measured temperatures of air and oceans, ice losses from the Greenland and Antarctic continents and the Arctic sea, and sea-level rise." Cicerone says.

"Increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the global atmosphere from human activities, principally fossil-fuel burning, are the likely cause of these changes. Earth's carbon cycle is out of balance, with more carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere each year than can be absorbed by oceans and land so that future climatic changes may be much larger.

"The challenge of meeting energy demand without causing dangerous climate change is joining two other strategic goals for energy: access to domestically secure and low-cost sources," he says.

The seminar is co-sponsored by the Tyson Research Center and I-CARES. It is free and open to the public.

The seminar is part of a larger conversation about climate change that is being led by Barbara Schaal, PhD, the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences, vice president of the National Academy of Sciences and director of the Tyson Research Center, and coordinated by Himadri Pakrasi, PhD, the George William and Irene Koechig Freiberg Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences, professor of energy in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, and director of I-CARES.

Cicerone’s research in atmospheric chemistry, climate change and energy has involved him in shaping science and environmental policy at the highest levels nationally and internationally.

He has taken a leading role in the writing of the National Research Council series of reports “America’s Climate Choices.” These are authoritative analyses produced at the request of Congress to inform and guide responses to climate change across the nation.

The series includes four focused panel reports and an overarching report. The panel reports are: Advancing the Science of Climate Change; Limiting the Magnitude of Climate Change; Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change; and Informing an Effective Response to Climate Change.

The overarching report is America’s Climate Choices: Final Report. All of the reports can be ordered from the National Academy of Sciences site: http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/sample-page/

“Its a great opportunity to hear one the nation’s leading scientists who was involved in the research on the topic and now leads a lot of the response to climate change, “ Schaal says.

An ongoing conversation

Schaal has long felt that the climate debate has not been moving forward fast enough.

As she points out, global warming has been a topic of concern since the late 1950s, when scientist Charles D. Keeling’s measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii first alerted the world to the progressive buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

When Schaal took over as director of the Tyson Research Center last summer, she felt she had been handed a golden opportunity to act on her concerns. At the research center, which includes 2,000 acres of woods, prairie, ponds and savannas located some 20 miles southwest of the Danforth Campus, dozens of WUSTL faculty study ecology, biodiversity and restoration management.

Schaal quickly discovered that Pakrasi was thinking on parallel lines as he sought to find ways to engage the entire university community in issues central to the I-CARES mission.

I-CARES was founded in 2007 to foster institutional, regional, and international research on biofuels from plant and microbial systems, sustainable alternative energy and the exploration of environmental systems and practices.

Under the I-CARES umbrella are the Tyson Research Center and the Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center (PARC).

“When I started thinking about climate change, it became absolutely clear in my mind that the entire institution should be involved, and we don’t have anything going on that is focused that broadly,” Pakrasi says.

By design, the initial group that met in October to brainstorm was small and comprised people from disparate disciplines. “We have anthropologists, we have engineers, we have artists, we have social scientists,” Schaal says. “The broader the better. That’s where you’re going to get the real synergies — among all the disciplines, not just science.”

The climate change conversation is one of three I-CARES conversations Pakrasi hopes to start this year.

A second conversation, “Building for the Future of Our Cities,” led by Christof Jantzen, the I-CARES Professor of Practice in the School of Architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, and Bruce Lindsey, the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration and dean of the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, is getting underway this month.

What might come of a conversation

One purpose of the conversation, Schaal says, is to lift the pall of apathy that seems to have fallen over the topic of climate change.

“It’s so easy for people just to give up, and we can’t do that,” Schaal says. “Tyson gave me an opportunity to say, ‘let’s talk about climate change at this university, not just in science but across a lot of different fields, and see what we can do.’

“Let’s see if we can get graduate students interested — I know the undergraduates are tremendously interested. There are many things that can be done,” Schaal says.

“One of the problems with universities,” Schaal says, “is that it’s really hard to learn what other people are studying. But once you know what somebody else is doing, you can see really wonderful areas of overlap where there could be collaborations. So one purpose of the conversation is to locate the synergies among faculty,” she says.

Pakrasi says he regards the I-CARES conversations as similar to start-up companies; they will live or die by their success in engaging the university community.

“It’s up to them,” Pakrasi says. “They need to feel that this is important enough that they will do all that needs to be done.”

But both Schaal and Pakrasi are deeply committed to the climate change conversation.

“I view climate change as a tremendous challenge,” Schaal says. “Something that is going to be with us for a long time, something that I think our undergraduate students need to be aware of and educated about, and something that a responsible university needs to address.”

Pakrasi needs no convincing. His family was displaced to India from Bangladesh, widely recognized as one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, and already suffering increased rainfall, rising sea levels and ferocious tropical cyclones.

“Another foot of water will take 80 percent of that country below water,” he says. “It’s beyond getting worried, we need to prepare for the changes that are coming.”

Pakrasi remains optimistic. “The hope is always with the young people,” he says, “because it’s their future that’s at stake.”

For a video of Barbara Schaal introducing Ralph Cicerone’s talk “Climate Change Seen from Space and Earth’s Surface,” visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jd5A_FLOtc

St. Louis Open Streets set to be model for national movement

Jessica Martin — 2012-01-13 00:00:00

Open Streets Initiatives, a movement growing around the United States, open urban spaces normally reserved for cars to people, providing a safe environment for socializing and other activities. The goal of the events is to promote healthy living and community building.

Researchers at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, evaluated the 2011 St. Louis Open Streets Initiative to examine participation in the events.

St. Louis Open Streets, held over two weekends in Oct., brought bicycling, walking and other diverse events to streets in Old North St. Louis and The Grove neighborhoods.

“With over 1,800 participants in 2011 and leadership from the mayor’s office, St. Louis has the potential to become a model and leader in the Open Streets movement,” says J. Aaron Hipp, PhD, assistant professor of public health at the Brown School.

“Open Streets events allow cities to showcase its infrastructure and neighborhoods from a different vantage point and to new populations. Riding a bike or walking down a street that you may otherwise drive or bus down brings an entirely new perspective. People realize how close destinations are by foot and bike, such as the market, restaurant, park and school.”

Brown School researchers looked at how participants spent their time at 2011 St. Louis Open Streets events.

Hipp and Amy Eyler, PhD, research associate professor at the Brown School, found that St. Louis Open Streets attendees spent an average of 108 minutes at the events.

On the economic front, 73 percent of participants spent money at a restaurant or store on the event route and 68 percent became newly aware of a store or restaurant during the event.

Eyler and Hipp also found that at least 94 percent of the participants felt that Open Streets events are welcoming to everyone, strengthen the community, are safe and positively change people’s feelings about the city.

“Neighborhoods are showcased during these events,” Hipp says

“Over half of the participants are from outside the city, much less the neighborhood. These participants will certainly identify new areas to explore and hopefully feel pride and a sense of safety and togetherness in the city and region. These goals are ambitious, but all of these have potential and I think our results show this happening already.”

St. Louis Open Streets face a number of challenges moving forward.

The demographics of the 2011 participants do not match those of the City of St. Louis.

“Moving forward, Open Streets needs to be promoted to segments of the community that were underrepresented in 2011, particularly the African-American community,” Eyler says.

“Marketing and outreach activities should go through trusted community partners such as schools, neighborhood organizations and advocacy groups.”

Hipp and Eyler also are building a campaign to encourage participation by urban youth and families in 2012 Open Streets events in St. Louis.

To view a report on St. Louis Open Streets, visit news.wustl.edu/news/PublishingImages/OpenStreets2011.pdf.

Chris Casey, staff member at the Brown School’s Health Communications Research Lab, designed the report and served as a co-investigator on the project.

Supreme Court Texas redistricting case could mark major change in Voting Rights Act

2012-01-09 00:00:00

In the case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, Texas is contesting a federal court’s redrawing of the state’s electoral district lines for the upcoming primary election.

Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Texas must get preclearance from the U.S. Department of Justice before it can institute any voting changes.

“This case gives the Supreme Court an opportunity to weaken or even strike down Section 5,” says Gregory Magarian, JD, election law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.

Magarian

“If Texas wins, even if the Court stops short of striking down Section 5 altogether, it will mark a major change in the law. The Supreme Court will essentially be saying that racial voting discrimination by state officials is no longer a problem that justifies a federal remedy.”

Following the 2010 census, the Texas legislature redrew the state’s electoral districts, adding four new Congressional districts reflecting the state's growth. Various groups, mostly representing the interests of Latino voters, challenged the legislature’s map as racially discriminatory. Texas did not get federal preclearance within the required time frame.

“The legislature’s map does very little to increase the voting power of Latinos, who accounted for two-thirds of the state’s population growth during the past decade, so the challengers have a credible argument that the legislature violated the core principles of racial neutrality that Section 5 is designed to safeguard,” Magarian says.

The three-judge district court assigned to hear the challenges drew its own interim map; Texas argues that the court should have allowed the state to use the legislature’s map pending resolution of the dispute.

Predictions

“The facts of this case are somewhat unusual, but if the Supreme Court were deciding the case purely on the basis of past precedent, the challengers should prevail,” Magarian says.

“The district court confronted a situation where Texas had failed to secure preclearance, and accordingly the district court did what it was supposed to do – draw its own map. The map appears to satisfy basic principles of election law.”

Magarian says the case is important because “several members of the Court – including Justice (Anthony) Kennedy, likely the pivotal vote – have expressed doubts about the continuing viability of the Section 5 preclearance requirement, based on concerns about federalism.”

MEDIA ADVISORY: McCaskill continues energy tour with Jan. 9 visit to Washington University in St. Louis

2012-01-06 00:00:00

WHO: U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill will participate in a roundtable discussion with Washington University administrators and energy researchers, and the region’s energy leaders on the nation’s urgent energy needs while addressing important environmental concerns.

WHAT: Roundtable energy discussion and tour of Washington University’s Ultrafast Laser Facility.

WHERE: Washington University’s Brauer Hall, Room 3015, near the corner of Skinker Boulevard and Forest Park Parkway. From Forest Park Parkway, enter Danforth Campus at Hoyt Drive. Turn at first left (east) into parking lot. Brauer Hall, dedicated to teaching and research in energy and environmental engineering at WUSTL’s School of Engineering & Applied Science, is the second building on left.

WHEN: Noon on Monday, Jan. 9, 2012

MEDIA ACCESS: The media are invited to cover the roundtable discussion and the 1 p.m. laser facility tour. McCaskill and other discussion participants will be available for interviews during the tour or immediately following the tour at 1:15.

WHY: McCaskill is visiting WUSTL as part of her statewide Hometown Energy Tour that began Jan. 5, focused on finding “practical, accessible, and affordable” solutions to meet the nation’s energy needs.

As one of the country’s leaders in the development of new energy sources as well as one of the region’s leaders in helping St. Louis become a worldwide center for bioenergy research, Washington University is playing a major role in the effort to provide clean energy resources to the world.

The university is also a leader in sustainability initiatives and programs. Among its notable accomplishments, Washington University is the first university in the country to ban the sale and use of bottled water throughout its main campus and its Living Learning Center shares the world’s first full “Living Building” certification.

The Ultrafast Laser Facility that McCaskill will tour is part of WUSTL’s Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center (PARC), established with a $20 million research award — the largest ever on the Danforth Campus — from the U.S. Department of Energy to do research on novel energy initiatives. PARC researchers are studying forms of energy based on the principles of light harvesting and energy funneling.

PARC comes under the umbrella of WUSTL’s International Center for Advanced Research in Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES), started in 2007 to foster research on energy, environment and sustainability that can contribute to rapid progress in addressing the world’s energy needs.

Does Mitt Romney belong to a cult?

2012-01-05 00:00:00

A Jan. 4 Huffington Post headline proclaims: “Rick Santorum called Mormonism ‘dangerous cult’ in minds of ‘some Christians’ in 2007.”

Frank Flinn

Is Mormonism really a cult? Frank K. Flinn, PhD, a professor emeritus of religious studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that Republican detractors hope to do political damage by labeling Mitt Romney’s religion as a cult. However, this labeling creates a constitutional blur that threatens religious liberty, he says.

Flinn, who has served as an expert witness on the legal definition of religion in court cases in North America and abroad, says, over time religious groups evolve and fall in and out of acceptance. People may make distinctions about which religious groups are respectable or deviant, he says, but the US Constitution does not.

Flinn’s comments follow.

Mitt Romney’s Republican enemies think that they can do him political damage by labeling his Mormon religion as a “cult.” The term cult is a highly charged, ambiguous and even dangerous word. Like spy in the rhyme set “tinker, tailor, soldier, spy,” the term cult occupies the last and most dubious place in the set of religious social categories “church, denomination, sect, cult.”

After the Jonestown Massacre in 1978 the word “cult” acquired nefarious associations. To many, it now implies brainwashed followers controlled by a charismatic, deranged leader who promotes bizarre beliefs and engages in sexual perversions and financial skullduggery.

Scholars of religion like Ernst Troetsch and H. Richard Niebuhr laid the foundation for the set terms to distinguish types of religious movements and organizations. By the 1960s, the terms were arranged in a grid of mutual comparisons and contrasts.

Viewed as:	Respectable	Deviant
Exclusive:	church	sect
Pluralistic:	denomination	cult

Churches and sects claim to have the exclusive access to the truth. Roman Catholicism is put up as the classic example of a church. The classic example of a sect was the Puritans, a Protestant separatist movement that broke away from the Church of England that the Puritans believed to be corrupted by “popery.”

Denominations and cults do not claim exclusive access to religious truth. Niebuhr used the term “denomination” to describe the varieties of Protestantism in America. Here a person could be baptized a Baptist, move to a city with no Baptist churches and comfortably attend the local Methodist congregation.

The wider society deems churches and denominations respectable, while sects and cults are labeled deviant. These designations are often applied arbitrarily. The case of Mormonism proves the point.

Again, “cult” is the odd-man-out in this schema. Earlier, the term referred to the “unchurched,” those who had no religion or were alienated from traditional religion and went on a religious quest. Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society is often cited as a classic example of a cult. Cults were not only pluralistic, they were multiplistic: each person sought his or her own individual path.

Actual living religious groups are dynamic and evolve in diverse and surprising ways. Terms, categories and classification are ultimately temporary tags. Living groups will display mixtures and tendencies that defy the labels. As the saying goes, yesterday’s “cult” is tomorrow’s religion. Many religions began as classic “cults” or sects and then evolved into the category of denomination. The Seventh Day Adventists and the Mormons are cases in point, although Mormonism still bears the epithet of “cult” from many of its opponents.

By calling a group a “cult,” some believe that they establish it as a pseudo-religion. The term is now such a red flag that scholars of religion have switched to descriptive phrases such as “New Religious Movement” (NRM) or “Alternative Religious Movement” (ARM). Unfortunately, the media love to use the word “cult.”

The root of the term “cult” is Latin word colere that means both to till the soil and to worship. Ancient Roman farmers offered sacrifices to the harvest deities such as Ceres at the boundaries of their field. Thus, the term took on a double meaning. Cultus refers to the external rites of worship and devotion, as in the Catholic cult of Mary. Today, the term has secular meanings. We hear of the “Elvis cult” or the “fashion cult.” Here the word means a passing fad. Obviously, the term has difficulties in ways that “church” and “denomination” do not.

Labeling a group a cult creates a constitutional blur that threatens religious liberty. The constitution uses only one word for all of the phenomena I have been discussing: religion. So, the constitutional question is: “Is this a religion or is it not a religion?” The fact that a religious group is a church, denomination, sect, cult, assembly, fellowship, meeting, synagogue, gathering, mosque, coven, society, or congregation, is constitutionally irrelevant.

Leo Pfeffer, the great scholar of religious liberty, summed up the situation best at a conference held at Washington University law school in the mid-1980s. When asked to define the word cult, he said, “I would be happy to do so. If you like a fellow, you call his religion a faith; if you are indifferent toward him, you call it a sect; but if you really hate the b-----d, you call it a cult.”

Is Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith a religion in the full sense of the term? The simple answer is, yes. It may not be my religion, or even the religion I favor or approve of, but in the eyes of the Constitution it is a religion. Those who imply the opposite are playing dirty and being irresponsibly footloose with the most precious Clause of the Amendments to the Constitution — the First.

Weakening Video Privacy Protection Act a dangerous attack on intellectual privacy

Jessica Martin — 2012-01-05 00:00:00

Most people would rather not have their video viewing habits easily available to the public — no need for co-workers to know about your love of reality TV.

The Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 (VPPA) protects these records, but the House of Representatives — at the urging of Netflix and Facebook — recently voted to amend the VPPA, allowing companies to share movie watching habits much more easily.

“What’s at stake is intellectual privacy — the idea that records of our reading habits, movie watching habits and private conversations deserve special protection from other kinds of personal information,” says Neil Richards, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.

Richards

“The films we watch, the books we read and the websites we visit are essential to the ways we make sense of the world and make up our minds about political and non-political issues,” Richards says.

“Intellectual privacy protects our ability to think for ourselves, without worrying that other people might judge us based on what we read. It allows us to explore ideas that other people might not approve of, and to figure out our politics, sexuality, and personal values, among other things.”

Richards notes that for generations, librarians have understood this idea.

“Libraries were the Internet before computers — they presented the world of reading to us, and let us as patrons read and watch freely for ourselves,” he says.

“But librarians understood that intellectual privacy matters. A good library lets us read freely, but keeps our records confidential in order to safeguard our intellectual privacy.”

Netflix, Facebook and other companies argue that sharing is the way of the future.

“Sharing can be good, and sharing of what we watch and read is very important, but the way we share is essential,” Richards says.

“Telling our friends ‘hey, read this, it’s important’ or ‘watch this movie — it’s really moving’ is one of the great things that the Internet has made easier. But sharing has to be done on our terms, not on those that are most profitable for business.

“Industry groups are fond of saying that good privacy practices require consumer notice and consumer choice,” Richards says. “The current Video Privacy Protection Act is one of the few laws that does give consumers meaningful choice about protecting their sensitive personal information.

“Now is not the time to cut back on the VPPA’s protections. Now is the time to extend its protections to the whole range of intellectual records — the books we buy, our Internet search histories and ISP logs of what we read on the Internet.”

Read Richards’ comments on the VPPA amendment on the Concurring Opinions blog: concurringopinions.com/archives/2012/01/neil-richards-on-why-video-privacy-matters.html.

Impact of Assets and the Poor grows 20 years after its release

Jessica Martin — 2011-12-13 00:00:00

Michael Sherraden’s book, Assets and the Poor: A New American Welfare Policy, broke new ground on social policy in 1991. Twenty years later, its impact still is being felt around the world.

In Assets and the Poor, Sherraden, PhD, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, writes that asset accumulation is structured and subsidized for many non-poor households, primarily via retirement accounts and home ownership.

He argues that these opportunities should be available to all and proposes establishing individual savings accounts for the poor — also known as Individual Development Accounts (IDAs).

“The program is a reaction to strategies for asset accumulation like 401ks, which are not always available to low-income people,” says Sherraden, director of the Brown School’s Center for Social Development (CSD).

“The main idea is to offer a development account to everyone that begins at birth. Money could accumulate in these accounts and matching would be progressive, with lower-income families receiving a higher contribution.”

Since Sherraden first proposed IDAs 20 years ago, they have been adopted in federal legislation and in more than 40 states.

Sherraden’s work on assets has influenced policy development in the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Korea and other countries.

In the United Kingdom, between 2005-2010, all newborns were given an account at birth, with a larger initial deposit into the accounts of children in low-income families. This “Child Trust Fund” policy was successful and popular but fell victim to budget cutting in 2010 due to the European financial crisis.

Now, Sherraden and the CSD are focusing on testing Child Development Accounts (CDAs) in the United States.

CDAs are savings accounts that begin as early as birth and allow parents and children to accumulate savings for postsecondary education, homeownership or business initiatives.

“There is evidence that when there are savings and assets in the household — particularly savings in a child’s name — children have greater educational attainment, are more likely to do well in high school, attend college and graduate from college,” Sherraden says.

In the United States, there are a growing number of CDA programs influenced by the CSD’s research.

San Francisco has rolled out “Kids 2 College,” with plans for CDAs for all kindergartners. A bipartisan group in Congress has introduced the America Saving for Personal Investment, Retirement and Education (ASPIRE) Act for the past several years, which would provide to every newborn a CDA with an initial $500 contribution.

In a large research initiative, the CSD is leading the SEED for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK) experiment, which tests the impact of giving every child a CDA at birth to be used for post-secondary education. This work is intended to inform a national CDA policy in the United States.

“Through SEED OK, we have randomly given 1,300 children an account and randomly selected 1,300 children as controls,” Sherraden says.

“This is a rigorous, scientific test of the CDA policy concept over time,” he says. “We’re following the kids to see how they do in their early years and at school. Hopefully, someone will follow the children all the way through college.”

CSD also is studying savings accounts for youth in Colombia, Ghana, Kenya and Nepal as part of the YouthSave initiative.

Many of Sherraden’s former and current doctoral students hold leadership positions in these research projects. He hastens to add that all of this work is possible only because of the excellent staff at CSD and strong support of Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and the entire Washington University campus.

Sherraden’s impact on asset-building policy landed him on the 2010 TIME 100, the magazine’s list of the most influential people in the world.

Assets and the Poor, published by M.E. Sharpe, is published in a number of languages, including Chinese and Indonesian.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40X9x7VTYTI

Editors’ picks: 2011 WUSTL news stories worth a second look

2011-12-15 00:00:00

WUSTL news editors picked 11 stories from 2011 — some new, some old — but all worth a second look as we head into 2012.

Topics include tips for paying off holiday debts; why your gift list should not include the Ozark’s endangered collared lizard; and why Waffle House is a model of preparedness for businesses facing severe winter weather.

2011’s best research news stories offer insight on why “being good this year” is the norm for most humans; how social work education is helping adults make mid-life career changes; and how doctors are working to ensure that memories of painful surgeries will not be among those recalled on New Year’s Eve.

To reduce holiday debt, focus on high interest loans

The presents are purchased. The feasts have been bought. The tree is trimmed. Now comes the worst part of the holidays — the credit card bill. What’s the best way to pay it off? Pay down the loan with the highest interest rate. But consumers often take a slightly different approach, says a consumer behavior expert at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Video included.

Waffle House Index measures disaster’s impact one breakfast a time

What can Waffle House teach about disaster preparedness and risk management as we brace for the logistical challenges of extreme winter weather? Plenty, says a supply chain expert at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Video included.

10 tips for preventing weight gain over the holidays

Many websites and magazine articles offer ideas about how to lose weight over the holidays, but Connie Diekman, director of university nutrition at Washington University in St. Louis, says that people need to realize that weight loss during this time generally isn’t realistic. A little advance planning can ensure that, while people may not actually lose weight, they can keep weight gain in check.

Humans by nature cooperative, altruistic, social

Charitable donations and a general feeling of goodwill may increase during the holiday season, but research in the new book Origins of Altruism and Cooperation, edited by WUSTL professors Robert W. Sussman, PhD, and C. Robert Cloninger, MD, show that humans are by nature cooperative, altruistic and social all year long. The book’s authors argue that humans only revert to violence when stressed, abused, neglected or mentally ill.

Civil rights era preserved through film archive

The film adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help — which has been nominated for numerous awards this month, including the Screen Actors Guild’s best film cast and best female actor — depicts a fictional slice of the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Washington University in St. Louis holds one of the largest archives of civil rights media in the United States, thanks to the Henry Hampton collection and Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, a six-episode documentary on the American civil rights movement. Video included.

Restoring the collared lizard

Biologist Alan R. Templeton, PhD, fell in love with the eastern collared lizard that lives in the hot, dry Ozark glades when he was 13. By the time he returned from postgraduate work, 75 percent of the lizard populations had vanished. Over the next 30 years, he reintroduced lizards to a few glades and then sought to establish the disturbance regime that had once sustained them by advocating for the highly controversial process of landscape-scale burning. The cover article in the September issue of Ecology celebrates the success of this prolonged effort. Slideshow included.

Cosmic voyager has a layover in St. Louis

Last January, two amateur meteorite hunters dropped by the Washington University in St. Louis office of Randy Korotev, PhD, to show him their latest purchase: a 17-kilogram pallasite meteorite found in 2006 near Conception Junction (population 202) in northwest Missouri. Korotev, an expert in lunar meteorites, identified the stone as a piece of an asteroid. His lab also analyzed crystals within the rock to help identify its body of origin, eventually referring the meteorite hunters to UCLA for analysis of the metal in which the crystals are embedded. Video included.

Orangutan genome decoded; DNA more diverse than human’s

An international team of scientists, led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has decoded the DNA of a Sumatran orangutan. With this genome as a reference, the scientists then sequenced the genomes of five additional Sumatran and five Bornean orangutans, they report in the journal Nature. Video included.

Preventing memories of surgery

Anesthesiology researchers have shown that a device to reduce the risk that patients will recall their surgery does not lower the risk of intraoperative awareness any more than a less expensive method. Unintended intraoperative awareness occurs when a patient becomes aware during surgery and later remembers being in pain or feeling distress during the operation. Video included.

Study: Education helps those over 40 seeking new careers

Americans are remaining in the workforce longer and many are changing or advancing their careers well past age 40. The Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis decided to study the experiences of their students who came to get their MSW after the age of 40. The survey focuses on pathways to graduate school, their experience in the classroom as well as the field and their post-MSW careers. Nancy Morrow-Howell, PhD, professor of social work at the Brown School, says that these results can be applied to other graduate programs, particularly in fields that may face labor shortages in the future, such as education, health and social services. Video included.

Can U.S. law handle polygamy?

HBO’s Big Love and TLC’s reality-TV offering Sister Wives have thrust polygamy into popular culture in the United States. Estimates are that somewhere between 50,000-100,000 families in this country are currently risking criminal prosecution by practicing plural marriage. “Putting aside whether you think polygamy is ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ it is important to look at whether U.S. law is up to regulating marital multiplicity,” says Adrienne Davis, JD, an expert on gender relations and the William M. Van Cleve Professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. She proposes some default rules that might accommodate polygamy, while ensuring against some of its historic and ongoing abuses. Video included.

Sadat book wins international award

2011-12-12 00:00:00

Sadat

Leila Nadya Sadat, JD, the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, recently received the 2011 Book of the Year Award from the American National Section of L’Association Internationale de Droit Pénal (AIDP) for Forging a Convention for Crimes Against Humanity.

The book, published through Cambridge University Press, includes 15 essays addressing various aspects of crimes against humanity. Sadat served as editor for the book, which was released at the culmination of the more than three-year Crimes Against Humanity (CAH) Initiative at WUSTL’s Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute.

“I am honored that this book has been recognized by the American Section of the International Association of Penal Law,” says Sadat, director of the institute.

“The Crimes Against Humanity Initiative was the most ambitious project the Harris Institute has ever undertaken, and it is gratifying to see the hard work of so many honored in this way, particularly by AIDP, which was a leader in promoting the International Criminal Court as early as 1926,” Sadat says.

Sadat previously received an article of the year award from AIDP for her American Journal of Comparative Law article, “The Nuremberg Paradox.”

Founded in 1924, AIDP is the world’s oldest association of specialists in penal law. It is committed to the study of criminal policy and the codification of penal law, comparative criminal law, human rights in the administration of criminal justice, and international criminal law.

“Forging a Convention is not only a book worthy of praise for its content, but it also so very clearly furthers the goals of our organization,” says Michael J. Kelly, JD, AIDP member and associate dean for international programs at Creighton University School of Law.

The AIDP goals are “to educate the global community on the development and furtherance of international criminal law, and to push governments and courts to adopt more aggressive policies in this regard,” Kelly adds.

Forging a Convention also contains the complete text in both English and French of the CAH Initiative’s proposed international convention on this category of crime.

The book recounts the comprehensive history of the CAH Initiative process.

In addition to Sadat, contributors to the book are: Richard Goldstone, Gareth Evans, Roger S. Clark, Payam Akhavan, M. Cherif Bassiouni, David Crane, Valerie Oosterveld, Göran Sluiter, Guénaël Mettraux, John Hagan, Todd J. Haugh, Diane Orentlicher, Elies van Sliedregt, Michael P. Scharf, Michael A. Newton, Kai Ambos, David Scheffer, Laura M. Olson, and Gregory H. Stanton.

The proposed CAH Convention builds on the legacy of Nuremberg. Following the 1945 Nuremberg trials, the Genocide Convention was adopted in 1948. The next year, the Geneva Conventions were codified to address war crimes. However, similar conventions were not adopted for crimes against humanity — a category that includes murder, extermination, rape and torture.

In the decades that followed Nuremberg, the world community continued to see horrific acts perpetrated against citizens of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and other countries around the world.

The fruit of the Harris Institute’s CAH Initiative, the proposed convention fills a critical gap in international law.

For more information on the book, visit law.wustl.edu/harris/pages.aspx?id=8788.

Gerald Early’s A Level Playing Field examines the history of race and sports

Leslie Gibson McCarthy — 2011-12-07 00:00:00

The NBA is scheduled to resume play Dec. 25, but one possibly lingering legacy of the six-month lockout has nothing to do with salary caps and revenue sharing. In October, with tensions high and no end in sight, sportscaster Bryant Gumbel made headlines with incendiary comments aimed toward NBA Commissioner David Stern.

On his HBO show Real Sports, Gumbel called Stern a “modern plantation owner, treating NBA men as if they were his boys,” and said Stern’s moves during the impasse were “intended to do little more than show how he’s the one keeping the hired hands in their place.”

The remarks brought, yet again, the subject of race and sports into the forefront. A debate, says Gerald L. Early, PhD, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, that keeps recurring over and over again.

“Race remains a very salient point in sports,” Early says. “Thirty to 40 years since Curt Flood (challenged Major League Baseball’s reserve clause), since the rise of Muhammad Ali, since Harry Edwards urged black athletes to boycott the 1968 Olympics, when all these figures compared sports to slavery, the metaphor of slavery still has some power.

“Gumbel said that because he felt this was going to be not only a controversial or provocative statement, but it was going to be, for some, an accurate statement about the nature of things.

“So it makes me think, the more things change, the more they remain the same,” says Early, also director of WUSTL’s Center for the Humanities. “It certainly is proof that we still haven’t gotten post-racial with sports.”

All of which makes Early’s current book, A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports (Harvard University Press, 2011), more timely than ever.

The book is a series of essays that gives historical perspective to the issue of race and sports through distinct personalities such as Flood, baseball’s Jackie Robinson and NFL quarterback Donovan McNabb.

It is divided into two parts: The first, “Leveling the Playing Field,” emanates from a series of lectures Early delivered at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University in 2003, three lectures in one week’s time.

The second, “Heroism and the Republic of Sports,” is a series of published essays centering on Robinson that further Early’s assertion that “no athlete is merely an athlete” – particularly the African-American athlete.

The stage is set in his first essay, “When Worlds Collide: Jackie Robinson, Paul Robeson, Harry Truman and the Korean War.” It’s the story about how Robinson, “the most famous black American of that time,” was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee on the subject of black loyalty to the United States during the Cold War.

Robinson, Early writes, was “the great black representative man, who knew more tellingly than anyone else, as a tormented lion in his brief, tough middle age, that no great black athlete is only an athlete.”

Essays in the book also cover Flood’s challenge of baseball’s reserve clause and the Donovan McNabb/Rush Limbaugh controversy, during which Limbaugh, the mismatched ESPN analyst, questioned McNabb’s talent and brought his race into the conversation.

Early acknowledges the complexity of bringing race onto the playing field, but wants to keep people talking, and this series of essays is a conversation starter, providing historical background and context.

“African-Americans have, in a couple of sports, become quite dominant, and, where their presence is less dominant — such as in Major League Baseball — there’s all sorts of talk about why it isn’t what people think it should be,” Early says.

“There is lot of conversation about race and sports. So the presence of black people on the field matters in some way beyond just their performance. It takes on social and political relevance.”

Writes Early in the essay on McNabb: “In the story of the NFL quarterback, it is difficult to tell if Limbaugh’s remark is merely the beginning of the end or merely the end of a very long beginning.”

Eight years later, with public figures like Gumbel still bringing race into the conversation, it’s a very long beginning indeed.

About Gerald Early

Early is a noted essayist and American culture critic. A professor of English, of African and African-American studies, and of American culture studies, Early is the author of several books, including The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s.

He is also editor of numerous volumes, including The Muhammad Ali Reader and The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader. He served as a consultant on four of Ken Burns’ documentary films for the Public Broadcasting Service: Baseball; Jazz; Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson; and The War, and appeared in the first three as an on-air analyst.

Morrow-Howell named director of the Harvey A. Friedman Center for Aging

Jessica Martin — 2011-12-02 00:00:00

Nancy Morrow-Howell, PhD, the Ralph and Muriel Pumphrey Professor of Social Work at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, is the new director of WUSTL’s Harvey A. Friedman Center for Aging, effective Jan. 1, 2012, announced Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton.

Morrow-Howell succeeds John C. Morris, MD, the Harvey A. and Dorismae Hacker Friedman Distinguished Professor of Neurology and director of WUSTL’s Charles F. and Joanne Knight Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (Knight ADRC), the Memory and Aging Project and the Memory Diagnostic Center.

Morrow-Howell

“Professor Nancy Morrow-Howell is an outstanding choice for this important leadership position,” Wrighton says.

“She is a leading national scholar in gerontology, and will benefit from the great work of Dr. John Morris, the center’s founding director,” Wrighton says. “Developing a better understanding of how best to provide an excellent quality of life for the aging population, not just in the United States, but throughout the world, is an important issue for all of us.”

Morris will continue to serve the center as chair of its executive committee.

“Establishing a university-wide center that focuses on the critical societal impact of our rapidly aging population has enabled many productive, interdisciplinary collaborations with highly accomplished gerontological investigators, including Professor Morrow-Howell,” Morris says.

“As a leading research institution, Washington University has the capacity to make major contributions in the field of aging, and Professor Morrow-Howell is exceptionally well-positioned to extend the center’s scope to the international stage.

“My responsibilities in our Alzheimer’s disease studies have grown dramatically, so this is an ideal time to transition the directorship of the Center for Aging to her. Professor Morrow-Howell will also benefit enormously, as have I, from the remarkable support and friendship of the Friedman family.”

The Center for Aging, established in 1998, provides academic and administrative leadership to foster the development and implementation of activities that enhance productive aging.

This university-wide center, now part of the Institute for Public Health, promotes research, education, policy and service initiatives that enable older adults to remain healthy, active, empowered, contributing and independent for as long as possible.

Under Morris’ leadership, the Center for Aging fostered through pilot grant funding several junior investigators on both the Danforth and medical school campuses who leveraged their center awards into larger grants from the Ellison Medical Foundation and the National Institute on Aging (NIA).

The center also hosted the annual Friedman Lecture, bringing to WUSTL nationally recognized leaders in the field of aging.

At the Friedman Lecture, in association with the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Foundation, the center presents the annual Kopolow and Friedman awards for outstanding accomplishments in the care of older adults.

The center also forged a productive partnership with the Goldfarb School of Nursing at Barnes-Jewish College and has attracted undergraduate students from throughout the United States to participate in its Summer Aging Research Program.

Another project brought together the Center for Aging and the Jewish Federation of St. Louis. The ongoing Naturally Occurring Retirement Community demonstration project seeks to help older adults continue to live in their own homes. This collaboration led directly to a successful application to the NIA for a research grant to study the effects of exercise and cognitive training in improving everyday function.

Moving forward, a top priority for Morrow-Howell is to convene an international meeting of experts on global aging issues.

Morrow-Howell

Morrow-Howell is a national leader in gerontology, widely known for her work on productive and civic engagement of older adults.

In 1998, she organized the first national conference on productive engagement in later life and produced an important book to guide the development of a research agenda on the topic (Productive Aging: Concepts and Challenges, published by Johns Hopkins University Press).

Since then, she and her colleagues at the Brown School’s Center for Social Development have advanced thinking and research on strategies to maximize participation and enhance outcomes of older adults in work, volunteering, educational and caregiving roles.

Her productive aging agenda has received international attention, and this last summer, she organized a second conference on productive engagement of older adults in China.

At the Brown School, Morrow-Howell teaches gerontology courses as well as research methods. She has held many leadership positions, including directing the master’s level gerontology curriculum and chairing the PhD program. She is an active mentor for doctoral students studying issues of an aging society.

Morrow-Howell is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA), past chair of the Social Research, Policy, and Program section of the GSA, past-vice president of the Association for Gerontological Education in Social Work, and actively involved with the John A. Hartford Geriatric Social Work Initiative.

She received both the Washington University Distinguished Faculty Award and the Brown School’s Outstanding Faculty Award. She recently was awarded the Career Achievement Award from the Association for Gerontology Education in Social Work.

“I am so excited to build on the foundation that Dr. Morris established and to lead the Center for Aging into its next phase,” Morrow-Howell says.

“All disciplines at Washington University have a role to play in educating students and advancing knowledge about older adults and aging society. I hope to energize faculty, staff and students and increase activity related to gerontology,” she says.

In addition to her new role as director of the Center for Aging, Morrow-Howell will serve as the ambassador to the University of Hong Kong for the McDonnell International Scholars Academy.

The McDonnell International Scholars Academy brings together top scholars from many countries to pursue world-class education and research while forging a strong network with one another.

Once selected for this highly competitive program, each scholar is matched with a distinguished member of the Washington University faculty who serves as a mentor for the scholar and also as an “ambassador” to the university partner from which the scholar has graduated.

The ambassador assists the McDonnell Scholar in academic and professional life and travels annually with the scholar to the partner university to build relationships between the two institutions.

“Many societies around the world are growing older at an astonishing rate, and countries are facing similar challenges from population aging,” Morrow-Howell says.

“There is much to be learned from cross-cultural discussions and research projects on population aging. Through the McDonnell Academy, Washington University’s faculty and students can be an important part of knowledge development about aging societies around the globe.”

Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act decision will have massive, immediate impact

Jessica Martin — 2011-11-29 00:00:00

The Supreme Court will hear several states’ legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act, ensuring that the court — in late June 2012 — will deliver a momentous statement about the ever-contentious constitutional balance between federal and state power.

Magarian

“The key element of the states’ lawsuits targets the act’s requirement that everyone in the country must purchase commercial health insurance,” says constitutional law expert Gregory P. Magarian, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.

“From a policy standpoint, this individual mandate works much like Social Security taxation, ensuring that everyone has a stake in a system of public benefits. The challenger states, however, argue that the individual mandate exceeds the federal government’s authority by requiring people to buy a commercial product. The government maintains that Congress’ constitutional power to regulate commerce justifies the mandate.”

Magarian says that the legal dispute over the individual mandate implicates deep, perpetually controversial questions of constitutional federalism.

“In my view, the realities of modern economics and politics compel a generous reading of the federal government’s constitutional authority to regulate commerce,” he says.

“The court has acknowledged those realities in a series of decisions stretching back almost 75 years, consistently validating broad and ambitious federal regulations of crime, labor relations, the environment, and more. Based on these principles and precedents, I believe the court should uphold the act unequivocally.”

Magarian notes that no one, supporter or opponent of the act, can credibly claim that the Constitution’s text or history requires a particular result.

“Despite what we sometimes like to imagine, the court in constitutional cases makes law. It will do so in this case, and whatever law it makes will have massive and immediate practical impact,” he says.

“Constitutionally, however, the court’s decision will represent merely the latest movement in a controversy that will last as long as our Constitution does.”

Predictions

Magarian says that one element of the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case should worry supporters of the act.

“In addition to the individual mandate issue, the court agreed to consider the challenger states’ argument that the act’s extension of the Medicaid program coerces states by making them provide more services in exchange for federal funding,” he says.

“This argument makes little if any sense. The court has held that the Constitution places only negligible limits on the federal government’s power to attach conditions to its spending. Perhaps the court agreed to hear this issue simply out of attention to judicial efficiency.

“On the other hand, the opportunity to uphold the Medicaid extension could protect the court in the event it decided to strike down the individual mandate, creating an appearance of balance in what would really be a devastating loss for the government,” Magarian says.