Bio
Karl Deisseroth
Karl Deisseroth is associate professor of bioengineering and psychiatry at Stanford University. Deisseroth created optogenetics, a technology that uses light to precisely control and tune brain activity. His group is now extending this technology to probe the dynamics of neural circuits in health and disease. As a practicing psychiatrist, Deisseroth also employs brain stimulation for therapeutic purposes. His group uses a wide range of techniques including optics, stem cell and tissue engineering, electrophysiology, genomics, animal behavior, and computational network modeling. He has received numerous awards including the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE), the McKnight Foundation Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award, the Coulter Foundation Early Career Translational Research Award in Biomedical Engineering, and the Brilliant 10 Award from Popular Science, to name a few.
Thomas Goetz
Thomas Goetz is executive editor of WIRED magazine and author of the book The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine. Since Goetz joined WIRED in 2001, the magazine has been nominated for 18 National Magazine awards and has won nine times, including the top award for General Excellence three times. His cover stories at WIRED have been selected for both the Best American Science Writing and the Best Technology Writing anthologies. Before joining WIRED, Goetz held posts at the Village Voice, then at the Wall Street Journal, and The Industry Standard.
Hans Keirstead
Hans Keirstead is an associate professor of anatomy and neurobiology, and co-director and founder of the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine. Additionally, Keirstead is a professor at the Reeve-Irvine Research Center (RIRC). Founded by actor Christopher Reeve and philanthropist Joan Irvine, RIRC is a leading center for spinal cord injury research.
Keirstead directs research that investigates diseases of the nervous system. In order to bring his treatments to clinical trials, he has founded or partnered with biotechnology companies to fund and conduct pre-clinical and clinical development. He has won many awards including the National Institutes of Health's Mathilde Solowey Award in the Neurosciences in 2010. He has testified at the US Senate and House of Representatives on multiple occasions regarding stem cell research and policy.
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
- stem cell
In living organisms, an undifferentiated cell that can produce other cells that eventually make up specialized tissues and organs. There are two major types of stem cells, embryonic and adult. Embryonic stem cells are located in the inner mass of a blastocyst (an embryo at a very early stage of development), and they eventually give rise to every cell type of the adult organism. Adult stem cells are found in some tissues in the adult body, such as the epidermis of the skin, the lining of the small intestine, and the bone marrow, where they serve in the regeneration of old or worn tissue. In cancer treatment, blood-forming adult stem cells are routinely harvested from bone marrow, stored, and then reinfused into patients to replace blood cells destroyed by chemotherapy or radiation therapy. This potential for replacing damaged tissues has aroused great interest in using embryonic stem cells to treat a number of other conditions, such as Parkinson disease, severe burns, and damage to the spinal cord. Mouse embryonic stem cells are widely used to create genetically modified mice that serve as models for investigating human disease. However, the use of human embryonic stem cells, which requires destroying the blastocysts from which they are obtained, has raised objections by those who feel blastocyst-stage embryos are human beings. The first human stem cell line was created in 1998, using cells harvested from embryos produced through in vitro fertilization. The use of human embryonic stem cells is allowed in some countries and prohibited or restricted in others.
- stem cell on britannica.com
© 2010 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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