ӳ����ý

An ambulance brings a patient to the hospital with chest pains, shortness of breath, and nausea. Is it a panic attack? Or is it a heart attack? Diagnosing a myocardial infarction (heart attack) quickly is critical: heart attacks kill more than 600,000 people in the United States every year, but if a doctor can diagnose and begin treating a patient within the “golden hour” following a heart attack, the patient’s chances of survival and recovery improve substantially.

About every 25 seconds, someone in the U.S. will have a heart attack or stroke. Half will die as a result, or approximately 620,000 people every year. This means that heart disease accounts for about 25% of American deaths.

Because heart disease poses such a significant health threat, finding ways to predict who is likely to have a heart attack or stroke remains the subject of intense research.

Even though February is the month formally acknowledged as American Heart Month, it is a disease that is on the minds of many researchers at the ӳ����ý every day.

Earlier this month, we reported on a powerful analysis of next-generation sequencing data from the pilot phase of the that resulted in a rich, high-resolution map of structural variation — extra, missing, or rearranged DNA — in the human genome. That map, along with research tools created from it, will enable new studies of this kind of DNA variation in human biology and disease.

Ten years ago today, a groundbreaking was published in the journal Nature. It was a first full glimpse of our genetic blueprint, our DNA, made possible in part through the efforts of scientists at the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research (which later became part of the ӳ����ý).

Today, we commemorate this historic achievement and the scientific knowledge it has made possible.
 

Since 2007, a new type of human stem cell has been available for research study. The inducible pluripotent stem cell, or iPS cell, can go on to develop into any cell type of the body. Its source is a reprogrammed adult cell, not an embryonic cell (ES). When iPS cells were first created, many within scientific laboratories and certainly those external to the bench thought iPS cells would be the solution to the thorny issues surrounding the harvesting of embryonic sources of stem cells. They may in fact prove to be so.