Imagine being able to look into a crystal ball to see what the new millennium holds for science and medicine. Will gene therapy revolutionize the way physicians treat disease? Will police officers arrive at crime scenes sporting hand-held DNA sequencers? Will people be living on Marsand facing a unique set of biomedical challenges? Will xenotransplantation, cloning, and tissue engineering offer solutions to todays shortage of available organs? Will individuals routinely carry a CD-rom of their genetic blueprints to their doctor's appointments and pharmacists?
The Whitehead Institute's fifth annual press seminar, "Beyond the Scientific Frontier," offers an opportunity to gaze into that crystal ball. Leading scientists will share their predictions about the hottest tends at the frontier of biomedicine and separate myth from reality. As the enclosed program details, the speakers include Robert Langer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Valina Dawson of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Richard Mulligan of Children's Hospital. Richard Young, George Daley, Paul Matsudaira, and Rudolf Jaenisch -- all of the Whitehead Institute -- will also share their insights about such cutting-edge topics as DNA arrays, stem cells, forensics, and cloning.
The featured lunch speaker will be Eric Lander, Director of the Whitehead Institute's Center for Genome Research. Dr. Lander will describe the challenges of sequencing the human genome, as well as the road ahead for the growing field of genomics. The day will culminate with a tour of Whitehead's sequencing center -- the largest publicly funded center in the worldwhere you'll have the opportunity to see firsthand a state-of-the-art biology lab of the 21st century.
We expect an impressive audience of reporters and science writers from newspapers, magazines, and journals, including your colleagues from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Newsweek, ABC, and NBC.
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Contact: Stefanie Doebler
doebler@wi.mit.edu
617-258-9183
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research
24-Apr-2000