CU Anschutz In The News

“There was once a time where we could say schools are the safest place for a child to be, and they would agree,” said Steven Berkowitz, a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus who has worked with kids for 25 years. “They wouldn’t now, even though it’s still true. The perception of safety is no longer there.”

“There has just been a discomfort with the topic of firearm safety, in that many physicians didn’t know when they were supposed to talk about it, or didn’t know how to talk about it because they haven’t been trained,” said Dr. Betz, an AMA member who is deputy director of the Program for Injury Prevention, Education and Research at the Colorado School of Public Health. “Even if they wanted to talk about it, they weren’t sure when to do that, or how to do that.”

CAR-T uses the patient’s own immune system cells to attack and kill cancer cells. “We remove T-cells or immune cells from the patients and we genetically modify them so we reeducate them to see the tumor and then we reinfuse those cells back into patients,” said Dr. Terry Fry, Director of Cancer Immunotherapy at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital at CU Anschutz Medical Campus. … UCHealth is one of only a handful of hospitals nationwide using CAR-T cell therapy. The CU Anschutz Medical Campus is also one of only a handful of facilities capable of manufacturing the modified cells.

When Susan Potter decided to donate her body to science, she wanted to make an impact on humanity. "This will be my last will and testament," she said in a 2002 interview. "To leave something behind that would have an impact on the human race." Potter died in 2015, but thanks to groundbreaking technology and a long collaboration with University of Colorado scientist Vic Spitzer, she'll live on for generation of medical students. More than a decade before her death, Potter approached Spitzer, who heads CU's Center for Human Simulation, and asked to donate her body to science.

Susan Potter wanted to make a difference in life and in death. “That was my last will and testament: to leave something behind that would have an impact on the whole human race,” she said in a video for the CU School of Medicine. So, she decided to donate her body to science. She had seen a newspaper article about the Visible Human Project. After their death, a man and woman were frozen, sectioned and photographed for the world to see and learn from on the internet. Susan decided she wanted to do that, too, so she tracked down the man in charge at the CU School of Medicine. Vic Spitzer, PhD, eventually agreed to take her on. “She just persisted,” he said.

For the last 14 years, National Geographic has followed Dr. Vic Spitzer, a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz, and Susan Potter on her journey from life to becoming a "living cadaver." “Susan, like a lot of donors, came to CU to donate her body,” Spitzer said. “She saw a newspaper article about the visible human and sectioning the body so she seemed to understand what it meant to slice her body up into many pieces.”

"One of the realities of aging, and illnesses that are more common with age, is that our abilities change," said Dr. Hillary Lum of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora. "Activities that we've done our entire lives, such as driving, managing our own finances, and owning and using a gun, can also be affected," Lum told Reuters Health by email.