Presentation by Jon Peters. Since the Human Genome was sequenced more than a decade ago, scientists have been mining it for evolutionary relationships. Several new discoveries have confirmed our shared ancestry with the apes, and has confirmed our exit out of East Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Dr. Peters has been active promoting secular humanism and rational thought with the Center For Inquiry (Portland). In 2008 he founded Secular Humanists of East Portland. He has been the recipient of several teaching awards.
Presentation by Cliff Goldman & Larry Steward. We are a coalition of organizations who are fighting for comprehensive, equitable, publicly funded, healthcare. Every year 600 people in Oregon die, and another 8,000 suffer financial ruin all because they lack access to affordable care. We agree with the 77% of Oregonians who believe health care is a human right.
As we age, a stunning proportion of us develop clonal expansion of pre-leukemic cells in our blood and bone marrow. Drs. Jeff Tyner and Kim-Hien Dao explore this phenomenon and its implications for our understanding of malignancy, cancer therapies, and aging. Dr. Tyner is assistant professor of cell and developmental biology at the OHSU School of Medicine and is a member of the Knight Cancer Institute. He received an award from the AAAS for research that identifies cancer-causing mutations and finding drugs that target these mutations. Dr. Dao specializes in hematology and oncology.
We all make and follow plans, like recipes, tax instructions, or computer programs, but traditional forms of plans are not very good for many real-world situations, such as making the most of friends who show up to help carry out the plan, or of “multitasking” by ourselves. Our one-track minds have trouble organizing many things going on at once. David DiNucci has studied how to avoid such problems when employing lots of computers to help speed up big computer programs, and then found that those techniques could be generalized to more common situations. Dr. DiNucci was raised and educated in Portland, has worked for NASA and Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and is now continuing his research. He has served as President of HGP.