Millie Ray

Harvard Medical School, Mass General Hospital

Breakthrough Stem Cell Research

Have you ever wondered just what a stem cell really is? Or why your
tax dollars fund stem cell research? Can stem cells cure a disease? Do
we have the technology to clone ourselves? The rapidly growing field
of stem cell biology holds the promise of enormous benefits for
medicine and science, and is a platform for capital gains as well as
many legal and ethical issues. This talk will address these questions
and offer a viewpoint on how recent advents in stem cell biology will
affect the future of stem cell research and medicine.

Millie (Mridula) is currently a 3rd year graduate student in the
Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard Medical School.
She is also an associate producer at an online media company,
BioBusiness.tv. Recently (Summer 2009) she helped produce a 10-part
series on stem cells, interviewing key opinion leaders in academia,
finance, biotech and Pharma/medicine about the basics of stem cell
biology and the future of the field. In her undergraduate research,
she worked for two years in a leading stem cell lab at MIT. Her
current research involves characterizing the interactions of a group
of proteins which are essential to development.