WUSTL Top News Stories

Major hurdle cleared to diabetes transplants

Michael C. Purdy — 2013-06-13 00:00:00

Haytham Aly, PhD

Scientists have found a way to make insulin-producing cells multiply in the laboratory. Pictured in blue are the cells, while the insulin is green. Increased availability of these cells may facilitate treatment of patients with type 1 diabetes.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a way to trigger reproduction in the laboratory of clusters of human cells that make insulin, potentially removing a significant obstacle to transplanting the cells as a treatment for patients with type 1 diabetes.

Efforts to make this treatment possible have been limited by a dearth of insulin-producing beta cells that can be removed from donors after death, and by the stubborn refusal of human beta cells to proliferate in the laboratory after harvesting.

The new technique uses a cell conditioning solution originally developed to trigger reproduction of cells from the lining of the intestine.

“Until now, there didn’t seem to be a way to reliably make the limited supply of human beta cells proliferate in the laboratory and remain functional,” said Michael McDaniel, PhD, professor of pathology and immunology. “We have not only found a technique to make the cells willing to multiply, we’ve done it in a way that preserves their ability to make insulin.”

The findings are now available online in PLOS ONE.

The current method for harvesting human islets, which are comprised primarily of the insulin-producing beta cells, makes it necessary to find two or three donors to extract enough cells to produce an adequate supply of insulin to treat a single patient with diabetes.

The idea for the new technique came from an on-campus gathering to share research results. Lead author Haytham Aly, PhD, a postdoctoral research scholar, reported on his work with beta cells and was approached by Thaddeus Stappenbeck, MD, PhD, associate professor of pathology and immunology, who studies autoimmune problems in the gut. Stappenbeck had developed a medium that causes cells from the intestine’s lining to proliferate in test tubes.

“He said, why don’t you try it, and he gave us some samples,” Aly said. “We put the solution in our freezer for a month or so, and when we finally gave it a try, we were amazed at the results: human beta cells in Dr. Stappenbeck’s solution reproduced at a rate that was 20 times higher than beta cells in a solution that contained the sugar glucose.”

The ability to produce large quantities of human beta cells in the laboratory gives the researchers hope that they could one day be transplanted into patients with type 1 diabetes.

The advantage of Stappenbeck’s solution may be that it is designed to activate multiple growth signaling pathways in cells, according to the researchers. Earlier attempts to make beta cells proliferate focused on one or two growth pathways. The solution also activates genes that help prevent beta cells from dying.

Because pancreatic cancers are among the most deadly tumors, the scientists checked to make sure the proliferating beta cells weren’t becoming more like cancer cells. They found that none of the factors known to contribute to pancreatic cancer were active in the laboratory-grown beta cells.

“This is an important concern to keep in mind if we are to expand human beta cells in culture with this medium and subsequently transplant them into patients,” said Aly.

If the new availability of laboratory-grown beta cells makes it possible to treat patients with transplants from one donor instead of multiple donors, McDaniel noted, that might reduce the risk of immune system rejection of the transplants.

“Another benefit in using this novel growth medium to expand isolated human beta cells is that the cells remain healthier and have reduced levels of cell damage or death,” Aly said. “That may also reduce the chances of immune system rejection.”

This research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (DK006181 (MLM), NIH DK00618146S1 (MLM), DK07296 (MLM), NIH Washington University Diabetes Research Center Morphology and Metabolic Analysis Core DK20579 (MLM)), the American Diabetes Association (7-04-MN-32 (MLM)) and the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Foundation (7401-00 (MLM)). Human islets were obtained from the Integrated Islet Distribution Program (IIDP), sponsored by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International (JDRFI), and the JDRFI Sponsored Islets for Research Program at Washington University (JDRF-31-2008-382).

Aly H, Rohatgi N, Marshall CA, Grossenheider TC, Miyoshi H, Stappenbeck TS, Matkovich SJ, McDaniel ML. A novel strategy to increase the proliferative potential of adult human beta cells while maintaining their differentiated phenotype. PLOS ONE, June 12, 2013.

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.

SCOTUS Myriad Genetics decision a significant shift from status quo

2013-06-13 00:00:00

In the Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics decision, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that naturally occurring DNA sequences are “products of nature” and therefore cannot be patented.

Collins

“The Supreme Court’s holding represents a significant shift from the status quo,” said Kevin Emerson Collins, JD, patent law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “It reverses both the lower court and 20 years of precedent at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.”

Collins discusses the decision, including its potential economic impact:

The economic impact of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Myriad Genetics will consist of both benefits and costs. On the one hand, genetic material will be more available to researchers, making the path to future innovations that employ genetic material as part of the research process a bit smoother.

On the other hand, the reduction in the scope of patentable subject matter may decrease investment in the biotech industry, as investors are less certain how companies will earn a profit. The size of the reduction in investment in the biotech industry will depend upon the breadth the opinion is given in subsequent cases.

If the opinion is interpreted narrowly so that it applies only to DNA, then its economic impact may not be very large.

Not many biotech companies still have business models that are dependent on patents covering naturally occurring DNA sequences. However, there is nothing in the opinion that suggests that it will be limited to DNA. It is likely to apply to all naturally occurring molecules, and the number of biotech companies that rely on patent protection for isolated and purified naturally occurring molecules in general is likely much higher.

One question that remains to be answered in future cases is how much of a change to a naturally occurring substance is required to transform a product of nature into a patentable, man-made invention.

By invalidating Myriad’s claims to naturally occurring sequences isolated from human chromosomes, the Supreme Court held that the simple act of “snipping” a particular sequence out of a longer DNA molecule was not enough of a change to give rise to a patentable invention.

However, the Supreme Court also provided a limit to the exclusion of products of nature from the patent regime. It held that cDNA claims — claims to human genes with naturally occurring “junk” DNA sequences (introns) removed — describe patentable inventions rather than products of nature.

Alzheimer's brain change measured in humans

Michael C. Purdy — 2013-06-12 00:00:00

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have measured a significant and potentially pivotal difference between the brains of patients with an inherited form of Alzheimer’s disease and healthy family members who do not carry a mutation for the disease.

Bateman

Researchers have known that amyloid beta, a protein fragment, builds up into plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. They believe the plaques cause the memory loss and other cognitive problems that characterize the disease. Normal brain metabolism produces different forms of amyloid beta.

The new study shows that research participants with genetic mutations that cause early-onset Alzheimer’s make about 20 percent more of a specific form of amyloid beta – known as amyloid beta 42 – than family members who do not have the Alzheimer’s mutation.

Scientists found another, more surprising difference linked to amyloid beta 42 in mutation carriers: signs that amyloid beta 42 drops out of the cerebrospinal fluid much more quickly than other forms of amyloid beta. This may be because amyloid beta 42 is being deposited on brain amyloid plaques.

“These results indicate how much we should target amyloid beta 42 with Alzheimer’s drugs,” said Randall Bateman, MD, the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Distinguished Professor of Neurology. “We are hopeful that this and other research will lead to preventive therapies to delay or even possibly prevent Alzheimer’s disease.”

The study appears June 12 in Science Translational Medicine.

In addition to helping develop treatments for inherited Alzheimer’s, investigations of these conditions have helped scientists lay the groundwork for advances in treatment of the much more common sporadic forms of the disease.

Three forms account for most of the amyloid beta found in the cerebrospinal fluid: amyloid beta 38, 40 and 42. Earlier studies of the human brain after death and using animal research had suggested that amyloid beta 42 was the most important contributor to Alzheimer’s. The new study not only confirms this connection but also quantifies overproduction of amyloid beta 42 for the first time in living human brains.

Bateman, who co-developed a technique that measures the rate at which amyloid beta is produced and cleared from the cerebrospinal fluid, contacted several Washington University colleagues to see if they could develop a way to analyze the types of amyloid beta being produced in the brain.

Bateman, metabolism expert Bruce Patterson, PhD, and biomedical engineer Donald Elbert, PhD, created a new mathematical model to describe the production and clearance of amyloid beta.

The scientists applied the model to data from 11 research participants with Alzheimer’s mutations and 12 related family members who did not have the genetic errors that cause Alzheimer’s. The model let the scientists compare the production rates of the protein’s different forms, revealing an increase in amyloid beta 42 production in subjects with an Alzheimer’s gene.

Elbert

“Working in isolation, any one of us would likely have gotten the wrong answer, or no answer,” Elbert said. “Bringing our different skill sets together let us tackle a very complex physiological problem.”

Scientists are testing the new model on data from approximately 100 Alzheimer’s patients.

“We hope that our new insights about the production and clearance of amyloid beta proteins will pave the way for future studies aimed at understanding and altering the metabolic processes that underlie this devastating disease,” Patterson said.

Bateman, Elbert and Patterson have applied for a patent on the diagnostic use of their new model of amyloid beta metabolism. Bateman and co-author David M. Holtzman, MD, the Andrew B. and Gretchen P. Jones Professor and head of the Department of Neurology, are co-inventors of SILK (stable isotope linked kinetics), the technique for tracking amyloid beta production used in this study. The financial interests of the researchers and the university in the patent application and the existing patent are managed in accordance with conflict-of-interest policies and regulations.

Funding from the National Institute on Aging (RJB, 5P01AG026276-S1), the National Institutes of Health and an anonymous foundation supported this research.

Potter R, Patterson BW, Elbert DL, Ovod V, Kasten T, Sigurdson W, Mawuenyega K, Blazey T, Goate A, Chott R, Yarasheski KE, Holtzman DM, Morris JC, Benzinger TLS, Bateman RJ. Increased in vivo amyloid beta 42 production, exchange, and irreversible loss in presenilin mutation carriers. Science Translational Medicine, June 12, 2013.

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.

Missouri’s juvenile justice system in crisis, finds report

Jessica Martin — 2013-06-10 00:00:00

Missouri has been held out as a model for juvenile corrections programs, but the court system that puts young people into these programs is in crisis, finds a recent report by the National Juvenile Defender Center (NJDC).

“Many young people in Missouri wind up having to defend themselves in our juvenile courts – and sometimes from behind bars,” says Mae C. Quinn, JD, professor of law and co-director of the Civil Justice Clinic at Washington University in St. Louis.

“These young people deserve counsel to assist them throughout the juvenile court process, but due to inadequate funding and the problematic –potentially unconstitutional – structure of Missouri’s juvenile court system, this is not happening.”

http://youtu.be/3kd2dJd7Sko

Mae Quinn, JD, professor of law and co-director of the Civil Justice Clinic at Washington University in St. Louis, says that "Many young people in Missouri wind up having to defend themselves in our juvenile courts -- and sometimes from behind bars."

Quinn notes that juveniles pulled into the court system have a hard time pulling themselves out. “In fact, our juvenile court system often fails to account for modern due process norms. Through outdated practices that largely impact poor and minority children, our courts run the risk of reducing the life chances of our state’s most vulnerable youth,” she says.

“Yet most people don’t know about this part of the Missouri model of juvenile justice – a system that has come to be known across the country as cutting-edge in its approaches.”

The NJDC report found that: 1. Youth are systemically discouraged from accessing, and denied, counsel throughout the state; 2. Their basic rights are not adequately protected and often ignored; and 3. The structure of Missouri’s juvenile court system, by its very nature, presents constitutional issues, inherent conflicts, and a great deal of confusion about official stakeholder roles.

Students in Washington University School of Law’s Civil Justice Clinic are representing juveniles in Missouri. Their work is highlighted in the NJDC as best practices on behalf of young people charged with crimes.

“Our students represent children in Missouri’s courts to raise the bar, to say that business as usual is not good enough,” says Quinn. “The children’s rights are being violated. We are pairing quality juvenile representation with system reform.”

To read the full NJDC report visit: www.njdc.info/missouri.php

Tumors disable immune cells by using up sugar

Michael C. Purdy — 2013-06-06 00:00:00

http://youtu.be/7_UiBSJdDeA

Researcher Erika Pearce and her colleagues have found evidence that suggests cancer cells can disable an important immune cell's ability to fight.

Cancer cells’ appetite for sugar may have serious consequences for immune cell function, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have learned.

The scientists found that when they kept sugar away from critical immune cells called T cells, the cells no longer produced interferon gamma, an inflammatory compound important for fighting tumors and some kinds of infection.

“T cells can get into tumors, but unfortunately they are often ineffective at killing the cancer cells,” said Erika Pearce, PhD, assistant professor of pathology and immunology. “Lack of the ability to make interferon gamma could be one reason why they fail to kill tumors. By understanding more about how sugar metabolism affects interferon production, we may be able to develop treatments that fight tumors by enhancing T cell function. ”

According to Pearce, inhibiting interferon gamma production also may help scientists treat autoimmune disorders in which T cells cause too much inflammation.

The results appear June 6 in Cell.

Pearce’s insights arose from her research into the metabolism of T cells.

Like most cells, T cells can make energy either by using an efficient process called oxidative phosphorylation or a less efficient pathway called aerobic glycolysis.

Cells normally make most of their energy via oxidative phosphorylation, but they need oxygen to do so. If oxygen runs short, most cells switch to aerobic glycolysis. Low sugar levels can also force cells to use oxidative phosphorylation for their energy.

Scientists aren’t sure why, but many cells, including T cells, switch to aerobic glycolysis when they need to reproduce rapidly. T cells proliferate quickly as they begin to respond to invaders or tumors, and scientists have assumed their switch to aerobic glycolysis was essential for this replicative process.

For the new study, Chih-Hao Chang, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the Pearce lab and first author of the study, set up a system that allowed him to control the resources available to T cells in test tubes. Switching the sugars available to the cells let him force the cells to use either oxidative phosphorylation or aerobic glycolysis.

“The conventional view was that proliferating T cells needed to use glycolysis, ” Chang said. “We found that wasn’t true: they could also use oxidative phosphorylation to support proliferation.”

After proliferation starts, the T cells can sustain themselves with either energy-making process. But a problem arose when the scientists forced the T cells to switch from aerobic glycolysis to oxidative phosphorylation.

“The proteins involved in glycolysis don’t just disappear when glycolysis is turned off — they’re pretty stable proteins, so they can hang around in the cell and participate in other processes,” Pearce said. “In T cells this can be a problem since one of these proteins, GAPDH, can inhibit the production of interferon gamma.”

When the scientists put T cells in a dish with cancer cells, which regularly consume large amounts of sugar, the T cells’ ability to make inflammatory compounds was impaired. But when the researchers gave sugar directly to the T cells, production of those inflammatory compounds doubled.

“It’s like an on-off switch, and all we need to do to flip it is change the availability of sugar,” Pearce said. “T cells often can go everywhere — tumors, inflammation, infections — but sometimes they don’t do anything. If we can confirm that this same switch is involved in these failures in the body, we might be able to find a way to put the fight back into those T cells.”

Funding from the National Institutes of Health(AI091965 and CA158823 to ELP and CA164062 to EJP), the Canadian Institute of Health Research (MOP-93799 to RGJ), the Arthritis Society of Canada (RGJ), the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (GJWvdW), and the Emerald Foundation Young Investigator Award (ELP) supported this research.

Chang C-H, Curtis JD, Maggi Jr. LB, Faubert B, Villarino Av, O’Sullivan D, Huang S C-C, van der Windt GJW, Blagih J, Qiu J, Weber JD, Pearce EJ, Jones G, and Pearce EL.Posttranscriptional control of T cell effector function by aerobic glycolysis.
Cell, online June 6, 2013. DOI 10.1016/

Scientists map the wiring of the biological clock

Diana Lutz — 2013-06-05 00:00:00

This famous still of Harold Lloyd in the 1923 film Safety Last epitomizes the plight of modern human beings, equipped with biological clocks designed to adjust to gentle seasonal changes in daylight, but unable to make the brusque changes militated by mechanical clocks, shift work, travel across time zones and artificial lights.

The World Health Organization lists shift work as a potential carcinogen, says Erik Herzog, PhD, Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. And that’s just one example among many of the troubles we cause ourselves when we override the biological clocks in our brains and pay attention instead to the mechanical clocks on our wrists.

In the June 5 issue of Neuron, Herzog and his colleagues report the discovery of a crucial part of the biological clock: the wiring that sets its accuracy to within a few minutes out of the 1440 minutes per day. This wiring uses the neurotransmitter, GABA, to connect the individual cells of the biological clock in a fast network that changes strength with time of day.

Daily rhythms of sleep and metabolism are driven by a biological clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a structure in the brain made up of 20,000 neurons, all of which can keep daily (circadian) time individually.

If the SCN is to be a robust, but sensitive, timing system, the neurons must synchronize precisely with one another and adjust their rhythms to those of the environment.

Herzog’s lab has discovered a push-pull system in the SCN that does both. In 2005 they reported that the neurons in the clock network communicate by means of a neuropeptide (VIP) that pushes them to synchronize with one another.

And, as they now report in Neuron, these neurons also communicate with GABA that pulls on them weakly, so they are not too tightly coupled.

Together these two networks (VIP and GABA) ensure the clock runs as coordinated, precise timepiece but one that can still adjust its timing to synchronize with the environment.

“We think the neurotransmitter network is there to introduce enough jitter into the system to allow the neurons to resynchronize when environmental cues change, as they do with the seasons,” Herzog says.

But, he says, since this biological ‘reset button’ evolved long before mechanical clocks, artificial lights, and high-speed travel, it doesn’t introduce enough jitter to allow us to adjust quickly to the extreme time shifts of modern life, such as flying “backward” (east) through several time zones.

Understanding the push-pull system in the SCN has enormous implications for public health, bearing, as it does, on daylight saving times, shift work, school starting times, medical intern schedules, truck driver hours, and many other issues where the clock in the brain is pitted against the clock in the hand.

Synchronizing the cellular clocks
The “clock” inside each SCN neuron depends on the cyclic expression of a family of genes such as the Period (PER) genes. The expression of these genes and the neuron’s firing rate typically peak at mid-day and fall at night. The gene activity is like the cogs in a clock, and the electrical activity like the hands on the clock.

Each neuron in the SCN keeps time, but because they’re different cells, they have slightly different rhythms. Some run a little bit fast and others a bit slow. If the SCN as a whole is to function as a clock, its neurons need to synchronize with one another.

NIH

A wrench for the Brain Activity Map toolkit?

Ever since President Barack Obama announced a new initiative to map all the functional connections in the human brain, scientists have been worrying out loud that we may not yet have tools up to the task. After all, the brain has more than a billion neurons that make more than a trillion connections.

Herzog says the technique used in his lab to study the biological clock might be useful for the Brain Activity Map as well. By recording neuronal activity, researchers can look for correlated changes between cells. When neuron 1 increases its firing, neuron 2 might be excited and increase its firing.

The problem is knowing if that increase was a coincidence or a consequence. The technique, called BSAC (Between Sample Analysis of Connectivity) reliably reveals functional connections by first describing the statistics of impossible connections. If the two neurons are in different dishes, they cannot communicate so the increased firing of neuron 2 must have been a coincidence.

By recording from lots of neurons in independent networks, BSAC defines the weakest possible connections that can be detected within a neural network. This could be useful in mapping connections between pairs of neurons or between brain regions.

The goal of the recent work in the Herzog lab has been to figure out how the clock cells are connected to each other. “It wasn’t clear, for example, if each neuron communicated with just a few of its neighbors or with all of them,” Herzog says.

Mark Freeman, a graduate student in the lab, developed a method for recording the firing rate of about 100 neurons simultanously on a multi-electrode array. “You float the SCN neurons down gently,” Herzog says, “and the neurons will attach to the electrodes, creating a clock in a dish that will tick away for weeks or months.”

Using these electrode arrays, his lab demonstrated that the neurons in the SCN are synchronized by the exchange of the neuropeptide VIP (vasoactive intestinal polypeptide), which alters the expression of PER to speed up or slow down neurons until they are all in synch.

These synchronized networks are very precise, says Herzog. If you let them free-run in constant darkness they will lose or gain only a few minutes out of the 1,440 minutes in a day. So they’re accurate to within 1 or 2 percent.

But they’re ever so slightly off the 24-hour cycle tied to one turn of the planet on its axis. Over time they would drift far enough off that cycle to be of little use to us, unless they also had some means of synchronizing to local time.

http://youtu.be/kqFc4wriBvE

Herzog points out that the neurons in the SCN are coupled oscillators, like these metronomes on a table that has enough give that each metronome’s motion affects the others’. Like the metronomes, the neurons keep time individually and because they are coupled by the VIP network, they synchronize their beats. Video by the Ikeguchi Laboratory, in the graduate school of science and engineering at Saitama University in Japan. (You might want to turn down the sound before watching it.)

Resetting the cellular clocks
In the article published in Neuron, Herzog and his colleagues report on a second network in the biological clock.

In this network the connections are made by the neurotransmitter GABA (γ-amino-butyric acid). “We proved we had found a GABAergic network by applying drugs that block GABA receptors on the cells,” Herzog says. “All of the connections we had mapped between neurons dropped out.”

Remarkably, when the network drops out, the clock becomes more precise. So the GABAergic network destabilizes the clock; it jiggles it a little.

Herzog points out that the GABAergic network, is sparse, weak and fast (much faster than the VIP network, which relies on the slower action of a neuropeptide), as you might expect a jitter-generator to be.

“We think the GABAergic network is there to let our clocks adjust to environmental cues, such as gradual, seasonal changes in sunrise and sunset,” says Herzog.

It’s a bit like whacking an old television set that has lost vertical synch to get it to resynch with the broadcast signal.

But there isn’t enough jitter in the clock to allow it to make abrupt adjustments, such as the one-hour forward jump when Daylight Savings Time starts. That “spring forward” has been statistically shown to increase the likelihood of heart attacks and car accidents, Herzog says.

Some sleep aids, such as benzodiazepines, that activate the GABA receptors may make the circadian clock a little more jittery, helping people adjust to big time jumps, such as flying across time zones. “But we don’t yet know whether they can improve jetlag; if they do, we want to know if it is because they help you sleep on the long flight or because they help the biological clock adjust to the new time zone,” Herzog cautions.

In any case, it is clear that if people repeatedly force the clock to reset, they throw off more than sleep. The biological clock regulates metabolism and cell division as well as sleep/wake cycles. So shift work, for example, is associated both with metabolic disorders, such as diabetes, and with the unregulated cell division that characterizes cancer.

Fighting our biological clocks does a lot more than make us crabby coffee drinkers.

To hear Erik Herzog talking about his research go to the podcast "Circadian rhythms" on WUSTL's Hold that Thought.

Aligning values with employer can lead to promotion, suggests new study

Neil Schoenherr — 2013-06-05 00:00:00

Employees looking to move up within their organization should get on board with the goals and values of their employer, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Stuart Bunderson

The study, “Status and the True Believer: The Impact of Psychological Contracts on Social Status Attributions of Friendship and Influence,” shows that employees who are "true believers" in the mission of their organization gain more influence in the company, while those who are not as invested in the company’s mission become pushed to the periphery.

“In mission-driven companies — companies like Whole Foods Market or REI — the people who emerge as leaders are more than just nice guys. They are the ones who embrace the mission and values of the organization," says Stuart Bunderson, PhD, the George and Carol Bauer Professor of Organizational Ethics & Governance at Olin Business School and co-author of the study.

“But the belief has to be real,” Bunderson says “Faking a value system that aligns with your employer won’t work.”

The researchers tested their hypotheses in two organizations, a for-proﬁt business and a not-for-proﬁt service organization that explicitly embrace a social cause as part of their missions. They found that positions of status and influence more often went to the “true believers.”

The study, which is scheduled to appear in the management journal Organization Science, was co-authored by Bunderson with BYU professors John Bingham, Jeffery Thompson, and Jeffrey Bednar and Ohio State University's James Oldroyd.

Older adult clumsiness linked to brain changes

Gerry Everding — 2013-06-04 00:00:00

For many older adults, the aging process seems to go hand in hand with an annoying increase in clumsiness — difficulties dialing a phone, fumbling with keys in a lock or knocking over the occasional wine glass while reaching for a salt shaker.

While it’s easy to see these failings as a normal consequence of age-related breakdowns in agility, vision and other physical abilities, new research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that some of these day-to-day reaching and grasping difficulties may becaused by changes in the mental frame of reference that older adults use to visualize nearby objects.

“Reference frames help determine what in our environment we will pay attention to and they can affect how we interact with objects, such as controls for a car or dishes on a table,” said study co-author Richard Abrams, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences.

Abrams

“Our study shows that in addition to physical and perceptual changes, difficulties in interaction may also be caused by changes in how older adults mentally represent the objects near them.”

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, is co-authored by two recent graduates of the psychology graduate program at Washington University. The lead author, Emily K. Bloesch, PhD, is now a postdoctoral teaching associate at Central Michigan University. The third co-author, Christopher C. Davoli, PhD, is a postdoctoral psychology researcher at the University of Notre Dame.

When tested on a series of simple tasks involving hand movements, young people in this study adopted an attentional reference frame centered on the hand, while older study participants adopted a reference frame centered on the body.

Bloesch

Young adults, the researchers explain, have been shown to use an “action-centered” reference frame that is sensitive to the movements they are making. So, when young people move their hands to pick up an object, they remain aware of and sensitive to potential obstacles along the movement path. Older adults, on the other hand, tend to devote more attention to objects that are closer to their bodies — whether they are on the action path or not.

“We showed in our paper that older adults do not use an ‘action-centered’ reference frame. Instead, they use a ‘body-centered’ one,” Bloesch said. “As a result, they might be less able to effectively adjust their reaching movements to avoid obstacles — and that’s why they might knock over the wine glass after reaching for the salt shaker.”

Davoli

These findings mesh well with other research that has documented age-related physical declines in several areas of the brain that are responsible for hand-eye coordination. Older adults exhibit volumetric declines in the parietal cortex and intraparietal sulcus, as well as white-matter loss in the parietal lobe and precuneus. These declines may make the use of an action-centered reference frame difficult or impossible.

“These three areas are highly involved in visually guided hand actions like reaching and grasping and in creating attentional reference frames that are used to guide such actions. These neurological changes in older adults suggest that their representations of the space around them may be compromised relative to those of young adults and that, consequently, young and older adults might encode and attend to near-body space in fundamentally different ways,” the study finds.

As the U.S. population ages, research on these issues is becoming increasingly important. An estimated 60 to 70 percent of the elderly population reports difficulty with daily living activities, such as eating and bathing, and many show deficiencies in performing goal-directed hand movements. Knowing more about these aging-related changes in spatial representation, the researchers suggest, may eventually inspire options for skills training and other therapies to help seniors compensate for the cognitive declines that influence hand-eye coordination

This research is supported by Grant AG0030 from the National Institute on Aging.

Obituary: Thomas B. Ferguson, MD, professor emeritus of cardiothoracic surgery, 90

Julia Evangelou Strait — 2013-06-03 00:00:00

Thomas B. Ferguson, MD, professor emeritus of cardiothoracic surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, died Sunday, May 26, 2013, of complications following a heart valve procedure. He was 90.

Ferguson was a pioneer in heart surgery, playing an important role in bringing the first heart-lung machine to St. Louis in the late 1950s. In 1958, he and his colleagues performed Washington University’s first open-heart surgery with the aid of the new heart-lung pump.

Ferguson

He earned a medical degree from Duke University and continued his surgical training there before coming to Barnes Hospital and Washington University in 1951. He continued his training in cardiothoracic surgery, a relatively new specialty at the time, under Evarts Graham, MD, a well-known cardiothoracic surgeon who led Washington University’s Department of Surgery for more than three decades.

Ferguson spent four years in private practice in Florida in the early 1960s but returned to Washington University, where he stayed for the remainder of his long and distinguished career. He was a founding member of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons and is one of a small number of surgeons to have served as president of that organization as well as the American Association for Thoracic Surgery.

In 2009, Ferguson received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association for Thoracic Surgery.

Writing about the award in The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at the time, fellow Washington University cardiac surgeon James L. Cox, MD, said of Ferguson, “Tom’s greatness has been built on genuine substance, uncommon grace, singular generosity and an infectious laugh. Young surgeons of today need only look at Tom Ferguson to see the model to which they should all aspire, both as surgeons and as human beings.”

Ferguson is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Shanley Ferguson; sons Bruce Ferguson (Candice) and Scott Ferguson (Laura); daughter, Linda Benoist (Elliot); six grandchildren and a great-grandson.

A memorial service was held Friday, May 31, at the Episcopal Church of St. Michael and St. George in Clayton. A private burial was held at Bellefontaine Cemetery.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Ferguson Clinical Research Fund in Cardiothoracic Surgery, 660 S. Euclid, Campus Box 8234, St. Louis, MO 63110.

Place matters in analyzing students' performance, Washington University research finds

Kelly Wiese Niemeyer — 2013-06-04 00:00:00

Where a child lives makes a difference in how demographics and other factors influence algebra performance, and policies should take into account local variation, research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests.

The findings of William Tate, PhD, chair of the Department of Education and the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences, and Mark Hogrebe, PhD, an institutional researcher in the department, were published in the Journal of Mathematics Education at Teachers College (Columbia University).

Hogrebe and Tate said some of their research would not have been possible even 10 or 12 years ago, but thanks to advances in technology, they were able to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data and computer models to analyze relationships between various educational factors on a regional basis.

Their analysis is an example of the kind of research with which the university's GIS office can help faculty, students and administrators, though the office wasn't involved in this paper. (See previous Record story).

Image courtesy of Mark Hogrebe

The map shows the relationship between the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches and Algebra I scores in Missouri school districts. The dark-shaded areas are those in which a higher percentage of students receiving such lunches is associated with lower end-of-course algebra scores. This statistically significant relationship is not found in lighter-shaded areas. Districts in white generally are elementary-only and have no Algebra I data.

In the article, “Place, Poverty and Algebra: A Statewide Comparative Spatial Analysis of Variable Relationships,” Hogrebe and Tate wrote that too often, educational data such as test scores are analyzed by comparing differences between schools or districts when district lines are often arbitrary. A child living on Main Street likely is not that different from a child a block away, but in a different district, yet those two students may be notably different from two more 20 miles away in a small rural school, they reasoned.

A more logical approach is to see how locations across the state vary in educational contexts and to study how different ecologies affect academic outcomes, they said.

The article’s big takeaway was that place matters in analyzing relationships between algebra performance and other educational variables.

For example, the researchers studied whether a higher percentage of children in poverty was related to lower algebra scores, and whether higher teacher salaries meant higher algebra scores. They found those relationships held true in some districts but not across the board.

Their article used an example that aptly explains the issue: You wouldn’t consider one statewide weather forecast effective or reliable, so why is it acceptable that state education policies are one-size-fits-all?

Tate

Algebra was a logical subject to study, Tate said, because in American schools, it’s often viewed as a gateway course. That is, students who perform well in it are able to progress to higher-level math courses that often are necessary for a host of college courses and career fields, while students who can’t master it are foreclosed from such opportunities. Also, in Missouri at least, students take a statewide assessment exam, providing large amounts of comparable data.

Hogrebe and Tate found that a single, global measurement based on aggregated data doesn’t properly account for important local variations.

“There need to be location-specific solutions,” Tate said.

Policies are unlikely to help students or be cost-effective if they apply the same response statewide, the researchers found.

“The evidence suggests that’s not a good way of doing education policy-making,” Tate said.

The researchers hope their work helps inform education policy and guide lawmakers and others as they determine the best use of scarce resources.

To review the article, visit here.

Pretesting cervical tumors could inform treatment

Julia Evangelou Strait — 2013-05-31 00:00:00

Julie K. Schwarz, MD, PhD

Before treatment, left, a cervical tumor is visible (white arrow) on a PET/CT scan. After successful treatment, right, the tumor is no longer visible. For reasons that are not well understood, some patients’ tumors do not respond to therapy. Testing the tumor before treatment for vulnerability to chemotherapy predicts which patients will do well or poorly with standard treatment.

Doctors at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that testing cervical tumors before treatment for vulnerability to chemotherapy predicts whether patients will do well or poorly with standard treatment. The study supports the future possibility of personalized medicine for cervical cancer, a tumor normally addressed with a one-size-fits-all approach.

“Even though this is a small study, its strength is that it links a lab test of the tumor’s chemotherapy response to survival outcomes for the patients,” said Julie K. Schwarz, MD, PhD, assistant professor of radiation oncology. “Very few cancers have been studied this way, and this is the first such report for cervical cancer.”

Since 1999, nearly all cervical cancer cases have been treated the same way: daily radiation therapy targeted to the tumor plus a weekly intravenous infusion of the chemotherapy drug cisplatin.

“We believe that radiation does the majority of the work with cervical cancer,” said Schwarz, who treats patients at Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine. “But a randomized trial published in 1999 showed that combining it with cisplatin chemotherapy improved survival outcomes.”

Even today, according to Schwarz, doctors have no way of knowing who will do well or poorly with the combined radiation and chemotherapy that every patient receives. Now, Schwarz and her colleagues have shown that the tumor’s response to chemotherapy, independent of radiation, may be a major deciding factor in whether a patient will do well with the standard treatment.

The study appears online in the journal Gynecologic Oncology.

“This is evidence that cisplatin is not just helping the radiation work better,” Schwarz said. “It is having some direct toxic effect on cancer cells that may be hiding elsewhere in the body, some place where the radiation is not hitting it, since we target the radiation so precisely to the main tumor. We think it would be beneficial for that drug to be selected appropriately for the patient’s individual tumor.”

The investigators tested tumors from 33 cervical cancer patients before their treatment began. They divided the patients’ tumors into three categories – responsive, intermediate response and nonresponsive -- based on how well cisplatin killed the tumor cells growing in a dish.

For tumors categorized as responsive – those cancer cells that cisplatin killed most easily -- 100 percent of the patients were alive and disease-free after two years. For those that showed an intermediate response, 83 percent of the patients were alive and disease-free after two years. And for those tumors deemed nonresponsive, only 58 percent of patients had two-year disease-free survival.

Cervical cancers can be divided into two main types based on how they look under a microscope – squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma. The nonresponsive number was even worse for patients diagnosed with the more common squamous cell carcinoma, with 46 percent disease-free survival at two years.

“Ideally, we would like to be able to design clinical trials for the nonresponsive patients,” Schwarz said. “One chemotherapy drug isn’t working for everyone, but there isn’t going to be one explanation for why the chemo doesn’t work. It’s going to be 50 different explanations, and figuring that out is the challenge.”

Schwarz is quick to point out the weaknesses of this study. In addition to the small number of patients, the lab test used was not ideal and should not be used to decide therapy for patients, she said. The investigators initially evaluated 75 tumors for chemotherapy response. And though some patients’ data was not included because they did not adhere to the treatment regimen, 31 patients were excluded from the analysis because their tumor cells did not grow well in the lab.

“This is definitely not the definitive test,” Schwarz said. “But I think our results should prompt investigators to think outside the box and start generating new ideas about how best to treat this disease. The bottom line is a one-size-fits-all treatment for each patient is going by the wayside. As we develop personalized strategies, this is the sort of testing that can guide it.”

Julie K. Schwarz is supported by a K12 career development grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant number 5K12HD00145910.

Grigsby PW, Zighelboim I, Powell MA, Mutch DG, Schwarz JK. In vitro chemoresponse to cisplatin and outcomes in cervical cancer. Gynecologic Oncology. Published online before print April 13, 2013. doi: 10.1016/j.ygyno.2013.04.005

The Siteman Cancer Center, the only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center in Missouri, is ranked a top 10 cancer facility by U.S. News & World Report. Comprising the cancer research, prevention and treatment programs of Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine, Siteman is also Missouri’s only member of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.

Campus Author: The Japanese Supreme Court and Judicial Review

2013-05-30 00:00:00

David S. Law, JD, PhD, professor of law and professor of political science, has published a groundbreaking book on the Japanese judiciary and constitutional adjudication in Japan, titled The Japanese Supreme Court and Judicial Review (Gendaijinbunsha, 2013).

Law

“The book explores why the Japanese Supreme Court has largely failed to enforce Japan’s constitution,” Law says. “It also examines the practical consequences of how the judiciary is organized for the development of Japanese constitutional law, and the relationship between democracy and judicial review.”

Although the book is in Japanese, it draws heavily on articles published in English in the Texas Law Review and Washington University Law Review. The translator, Shin-ichi Nishikawa, is a distinguished political scientist at Meiji University who specializes in the study of the Japanese judiciary and bureaucracy.

Japan’s post-war constitution, the Nihonkoku Kenpō, has been the subject of recent attention as the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has renewed efforts to amend the provisions that prohibit Japan from militarizing. While popular among the Japanese people, the 1947 constitution has long been attacked by conservatives for having been “imposed” by the United States, Law observes.

By global standards, the Japanese Constitution is now considered relatively old at 66 years, yet it remains “one of the most up-to-date” and “squarely in the mainstream of global constitutionalism,” according to Law. He points out that, while the Japanese Constitution protects 19 of the “most popular constitutional rights” in the world, the U.S. Constitution includes only 12. For example, unlike the U.S. Constitution, the Japanese Constitution explicitly prohibits discrimination based on sex or social status, protects academic freedom, and contains a right to education.

Although Japan is among the growing number of countries that entrust their courts with special responsibility for upholding democracy and the rule of law by enforcing the constitution, Japan’s Supreme Court has fallen short of discharging this important responsibility, Law argues.
Despite the Nihonkoku Kenpō’s modernism and popularity, Law writes that “it is difficult to think of any constitutional court in the world that is more reluctant to exercise the power of judicial review . . . than the Japanese Supreme Court.” In its history, the Supreme Court of Japan has struck down only eight statutes on constitutional grounds.

Read more, including Law’s explanation for the Japanese high court’s failure to actively enforce the constitution, at:

http://law.wustl.edu/news/pages.aspx?id=9740

Deadly infections cut in sickest hospital patients

Caroline Arbanas — 2013-05-29 00:00:00

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

In hospital intensive care units, bathing patients daily with an antimicrobial soap and applying antibiotic ointment in the nose reduced by 44 percent bloodstream infections caused by dangerous pathogens, including the drug-resistant bacteria MRSA (above).

A major study in hospital intensive care units shows that bathing patients daily with an antimicrobial soap and applying antibiotic ointment in the nose reduced by 44 percent the bloodstream infections caused by dangerous pathogens, including the drug-resistant bacteria MRSA.

The effort to remove potentially harmful bacteria from ICUs also lowered by 37 percent the number of patients who harbored MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) on their bodies. These patients were not sick from the bacteria but were at risk for MRSA infections and spreading the germ to other patients.

The study’s findings are published online May 29 in The New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the University of California at Irvine, Harvard Pilgrim Health, Hospital Corporation of America and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were involved in the study.

Hospitals must be continually on guard to prevent infections that occur in patients during their stays. These infections can spread quickly, and the sickest patients are most at risk. While vigilant hand washing among hospital staff is critical, many infections also occur from bacteria in patients’ noses and on their skin.

The research involved nearly 75,000 patients who were treated at 43 hospitals, all owned by the Hospital Corporation of America. Infectious diseases physician Victoria Fraser, MD, head of Washington University’s Department of Medicine, helped design and oversee the study.

“The results of this study are very important,” said Fraser, also the Adolphus Busch Professor of Medicine. “The risks of acquiring health-care-associated infections and multidrug-resistant organisms among critically ill patients remain a significant challenge. This study demonstrates new and cost-effective methods to protect patients and improve outcomes in ICUs.”

MRSA is resistant to first-line antibiotic treatments and is a significant cause of illness and sometimes death, especially among patients receiving medical care. In hospital ICUs, 75 percent of MRSA infections are considered resistant to commonly used antibiotics.

Of the strategies tested for reducing MRSA infections, the one that proved most effective was arguably the simplest and most straightforward. Rather than screening patients in intensive care units for MRSA and isolating or treating only the carriers, all ICU patients were bathed daily using a soap treated with an antiseptic (chlorhexidine), and all received an antibiotic ointment (mupirocin) applied in the nose for five days.

At Barnes-Jewish Hospital, which was not part of the study, all ICU patients already are bathed daily with the chlorhexidine soap. That routine practice was implemented in 2009 after a study by Fraser and her colleagues showed that the antiseptic soap reduced hospital-associated infections by 25 percent among patients in the medical and surgical ICUs at Barnes-Jewish.

Mupirocin ointment is not used routinely in Barnes-Jewish ICUs or in most other hospital ICUs. There are a small number of bacteria that are already resistant to the antibiotic in the ointment and some concerns about whether broad use of mupirocin in ICUs could speed antibiotic resistance.

“Based on the new data, we’ll evaluate whether to incorporate mupirocin into routine use in our ICUs,” said David Warren, MD, medical director for infection prevention at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine. “If we use the ointment, we will closely monitor for antibiotic resistance.”

In ICUs, antibiotic-resistant bacteria that usually live harmlessly on the body cause many infections. These infections can cause serious complications for patients, increasing the duration of their hospital stays, driving up costs and raising the risk of death. To address the problem, some states have mandated MRSA screening by hospitals, but experts in the field have questioned whether other measures would be more effective.

As part of the study, patients in ICUs were randomly assigned to one of three approaches for reducing MRSA infections. Patients in the first group were screened for MRSA and isolated if they were found to be carrying the bacteria.

Those in the second group were similarly screened and carriers were isolated, but they also were bathed daily with chlorhexidine soap and received nasal mupirocin ointment for five days to help remove MRSA from the body. All ICU patients in the third group, regardless of whether they harbored MRSA on their bodies, received daily chlorhexidine baths and five days of mupirocin.

The third strategy, known as universal decolonization, was the most effective and the easiest to implement; it also eliminates the need for screening ICU patients for MRSA.

“Overall, the results are very encouraging and provocative,” Warren said. “The results potentially could be applied to many critically ill patients in ICUs throughout the country to reduce the incidence of dangerous infections.”_________________________________________________

The research was funded by the Healthcare-Associated Infections Program (HHSA290201000008I) from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as part of the Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions about Effectiveness (DEcIDE) program, and the Prevention Epicenters Program (1U01 CI000344) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Huang SS, Septimus ES, Kleinman K, Moody J, Hickok J, Avery TR, Lankiewicz J, Gombosev A, Terpstra L, Hartford F, Hayden MK, Jernigan JA, Weinstein RA, Fraser VJ, Haffenreffer K, Cui E, Kaganov RE, Lolans K, Perlin JB, Platt R. Targeted versus universal decolonization to prevent ICU infection. The New England Journal of Medicine. May 29, 2013.

Cornerstone’s Fields wins Gloria White service award

Kelly Wiese Niemeyer — 2013-05-24 00:00:00

Mary Butkus

Harvey Fields, PhD, addresses assembled WUSTL employees during a Staff Day ceremony May 20 in Edison Theatre at which he was honored with the Gloria W. White Distinguished Service Award. Fields is assistant director for academic programs at Cornerstone, the Center for Advanced Learning.

Harvey Fields, PhD, has worked at Washington University in St. Louis for nearly two decades, focusing on helping students and ensuring they achieve their full academic potential.

For his dedication to supporting students at Cornerstone, the Center for Advanced Learning, Fields received this year’s Gloria W. White Distinguished Service Award.

The service award presentation is part of WUSTL’s annual Staff Day celebration, held May 20 to recognize and thank the nonacademic staff who keep the university humming all year.

Fields is assistant director for academic programs at the center, where his responsibilities include creation and oversight of programs and resources to help undergraduate students achieve and maintain academic success. He also works to build and maintain partnerships with various undergraduate schools and departments.

“He is constantly thinking of ways to develop new and inventive approaches to enrich and support student learning, not just for the current year but for many years to come,” Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton said in announcing Fields as this year’s Gloria White award recipient. “His challenges for the group require everyone to work harder and be more creative; however, he doesn’t expect anyone to work harder or more creatively than he is already working.”

The annual honor was named for the late Gloria White, who retired in 1997 as vice chancellor for human resources after 30 years with the university. The award, which comes with a $1,000 prize, provides recognition to a nonacademic staff member for exceptional effort and contributions that have resulted in the betterment of the university.

Before joining the university, Fields worked for Procter & Gamble in various engineering and management positions. He earned bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and in chemical engineering from Morehouse College and the Georgia Institute of Technology, respectively. He later earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in chemistry, in Arts & Sciences, from WUSTL.

Fields also serves as pastor of Union Baptist Church in Chesterfield.

As a graduate student, Fields served as an academic tutor in the Department of Chemistry, and he has worked to teach and mentor students ever since.

Christine Street, JD, assistant director for disability resources at the Center for Advanced Learning, nominated Fields for the award. In her nomination letter, she talked about his passion, creativity and work to improve WUSTL and the greater St. Louis community.

“Harvey is always asking how we can do things better and how we can do more,” she wrote. “He is creative and flexible in developing academic support solutions that meet the needs of individuals as they come to us.”

Staff Day fun

The ceremony also included honoring employees who have worked at WUSTL for 10 or more years — some as long as 40 years.

To see a full listing of employees honored for years of service, visit here.

Afterward, staff members enjoyed a barbecue lunch, and then an afternoon full of fun activities, from a bike ride or bingo to a walking tour of campus or a softball tournament.

Kevin Lowder

WUSTL staff members, from left, Steven Vance, Christine Rezek and Pat Gregory take part in a bike ride as part of Staff Day activities.

The day wrapped up with a drawing for assorted prizes — such as lunches or tickets to the movies, Cardinals games and the grand prize of two plane tickets — plus Ted Drewes frozen custard in compostable containers, a nod to the university’s effort to be more environmentally friendly. To see many more photos of employees enjoying Staff Day, visit the WUSTL Flickr site.

Sporting competition winners

Volleyball: Resource Management team.
Golf: (women’s): Dannette Hutton and Sarah Miller; (men’s) Michael Genthon and Jason Patton; (co-ed) Mark Weinrich and Joanne Zap.
Softball: The Spin Docs, a team of members from the Athletics and Public Affairs departments.
Washers: Team Booya, otherwise known as Gene Fantasia and Craig Luciano of Information Services & Technology.

Prize drawing winners:

Karolyn Senter won the grand prize: two round-trip tickets on Delta Airlines. Stephanie Atkins and Charlie Johnson each won a night’s stay, with breakfast, at the Parkway Hotel. Trish Armstrong, Carolyn Crowell, Barb Laudel and Heidi Walsh each won two tickets to a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game. Jill Carnaghi, Brittney Hawkins, Andrew Johnstone and Sarah Sanning each won lunch for four in Anheuser-Busch Hall. Connie Anderson won two subscriptions to Edison Ovations or Ovations for Young People.

Paula Ballew, Angela Jeremias and Kate Woerheide won cooler bags with water bottles. Angela Mitchell and Jacob Zweifel each won a $20 gift certificate for AMC Movie Theater. Pat Hallquist won a weekend night package for two, with breakfast, at the Marriott. Mary Koppenhofer won lunch for two at the Whittemore House. Ann Marie Zeman won a weekend night deluxe accommodations stay at the Ritz Carlton. Kelcey Zutavern won a night’s stay for two at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Chris Sherman won a free room at the Comfort Inn. Kathleen Schasch won a night’s stay at the Drury Inn.

Drones may violate international law

Kelly Wiese Niemeyer — 2013-05-23 00:00:00

Sadat

As President Obama gives a speech on national security — including defending U.S. use of drones to combat terrorism — Leila Sadat, JD, international law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that such targeted killing by unmanned planes may violate international humanitarian law. Legalities aside, she also questions whether it promotes U.S. interests abroad.

Sadat wrote about the subject in her article, “America’s Drone Wars,” published in the Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law.

Sadat notes that drone strikes have become a major part of U.S. military strategy and counterterror operations, but writes that the U.S. use of drones raises several troubling legal questions, such as what is the legal foundation for government use of lethal force and whether drone strikes are considered acts of aggression against other countries. She finds that the Obama administration largely continued the policy and legal rationale of former President George W. Bush regarding drones.

The U.S. argues there are no geographical constraints in the war on terror, Sadat writes, but adds that most authorities reject that idea.

“The process used by the executive branch to determine who and when to target human beings for death can be summarized in two words: ‘trust us,’” she wrote in the article.

But while she believes the administration is cautious, mistakes still can occur, and innocent civilians get killed, raising legal, political and diplomatic worries for the U.S.

“Some of these ‘mistakes’ end up as YouTube videos … which serve as recruitment devices for al-Qaeda and its associates, and fuel anti-American sentiment in areas where drones are operating,” Sadat wrote.

Sadat recently was appointed a special adviser on crimes against humanity for the International Criminal Court. She also is director of WUSTL’s Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute and the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law.

To review the full article, visit here.