On April 3, 2013, the fourth biennial StemCONN conference took place at the Omni Hotel at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. This conference featured talks by scientists from across the country who are currently at the forefront of stem cell research, as well as talks by Edison Liu, President and CEO of the Jackson Laboratory, and Jonathan Rotherberg, PhD, a Yale alumnus and Ion Torrent Systems Fo...

IN ITS LANDMARK 2001 REPORT, CROSSING THE QUALITY Chasm, the Institute of Medicine not only documented high rates of defect in American health care but also wrote, stunningly, “In its current form, habits, and environment, American health care is incapable of providing the public with the quality care it expects and deserves.” The term incapable is an indictment: profound, uncomfortable, and wa...

uantum dots (QDs), fluorescent inorganic crystals 10 nm in diameter, offer several advantages over organic dyes for labeling biological samples. They resist photobleaching, and their emission spectra are narrow enough that multiple variants (excited by one wavelength) can be distinguished in a given sample. The feasibility of using QDs for biological uses is proven in two recent articles by Jyo...

The twenty-first century's greatestmedical challenge is degenerative disease. [...].

The topics discussed in this conference represent great scientific opportunity that we will exploit in the future. The objectives of the research programs at NIEHS have been to understand how chemicals interact with living material, cell metabolism, function, and structure. If these mechanisms are understood, it is easier to make judgments about potential health effects and to suggest ways to a...