Outdoor Science Talks at the Cantor Arts Center
Please join us for Stanford's acclaimed Summer Science Lecture Series on the lawn adjacent to the Cantor Arts Center on four Thursday evenings this summer. You are invited to come early and wander through the art museum, buy dinner in the Art Center's Cool Café or bring your own picnic, and then settle on the lawn outside to hear informal lectures about cutting-edge research from four of Stanford's most esteemed professors, all of whom are either current or former chairs of their academic departments.
We promise that all of the talks will be delivered in terms understandable to the lay public. So bring your whole family (high school age and up) and enjoy!
The Outdoor Science Series is co-sponsored by the Stanford Office for Science Outreach, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, and Stanford Continuing Studies.
Outdoor Science Talk 4 - Drugs: One Size Does Not Fit All
Variations in human genes are one of the factors in the different ways people respond to drugs. When a physician prescribes a drug to a patient, he or she is often betting that the patient will have a “typical” response based on the doctor's previous experience with the drug. It is often difficult to anticipate when a drug will work well or when it might cause significant side effects. Most people have had an experience taking a medication that did not work well or caused greaterthan- expected side effects. There are a number of causes for variation in drug response across the population, but differences in genetics are an important factor. In this talk, we will review how genetic variation can affect drug response, and discuss a few examples of variation in commonly used medications. We will also touch upon the ethical issues that arise when using genetic information to make decisions about drug development and delivery.
RUSS ALTMAN, Professor and Chair of Bioengineering Professor of Genetics and Medicine (and of Computer Science, by courtesy)
Russ Altman is the Director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Computation, and past president of the International Society for Computational Biology. His research focuses on the application of computational technologies to problems in molecular biology of relevance to medicine. He is a Fellow in the American College of Physicians and the author or co-author of more than 120 scientific papers.