Friday Grand Rounds: Susan Desmond-Hellmann Outlines Her Vision for UCSF and Teaches Us a Thing or Two About Leadership and Goals

Today, we are going to listen to an interview with Susan Desmond-Hellmann.  She is a UCSF-trained oncologist who, after spending 14 years at the helm of Genentech, is now back at UCSF as its first woman chancellor.

Helping Win Steve Jobs' Pancreatic Cancer Fight For All of US Because iPads Are Not the Only Things That Matter

Yesterday, Steve Jobs once again returned to the world stage to introduce Apple's new iPad2 and once again the spotlight was also put on his ongoing battle with pancreatic cancer. 

Friday Grand Rounds: Russ Altman Introduces Pharmacogenomics Database PharmGKB

Every human cell, with two sets of 23 chromosomes, contains six-billion basepairs of DNA (or three-billion per haploid genome).  Of these three-billion genomic basepairs, each individual shares 99.7% with the rest of the humanity.  It is the three-tenths of a percent that determines the differences between all of us.  This tiny percent, nevertheless, comprises of about a million positions that not only make us unique individuals, but also determine how we respond to environment, succumb to certain diseases, or respond (or not) to certain drugs.  These single nucleotide changes, scattered all over the genome, are called single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP, pronounced snip) - for example, I may have Adenine at position X, you may have C and my friend may have G at the same position.  Since the complete sequencing of human genome in 2003, the post-genomic goal has been, to answer how this 0.3% of genome determines phenotype.  Pharmacogenomics/Pharmacogenetics (PGx) is the study of how genetic makeup correlates to responses to various drugs.  

Friday Grand Rounds: Harold Varmus Discusses Cancer Cell Biology and Clinical Translation

Thirty-five years ago Harold E. Varmus [wikipedia], along with J. Michael Bishop, discovered the role of oncogenes in cancer.  That seminal discovery in 1975 gave cancer researchers a path, "the road to be taken," that has today led to great advancements in clinical oncology; it has changed the face of a growing number of cancer types to potentially curable or manageable forms.  Not long ago, both scientists were honored with the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1989 [read, [here, here]

Ever heard of Pecha-Kucha, I just did

There was a story this afternoon on NPR "Hate Long, Rambling Speeches? Try Pecha-Kucha" by Lucy Craft which is worth publicizing and whose lessons worth adopting.