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2018

Complexity: The Intersections Between Health and Policy


  • Welcome

  • I. Scaling our Thinking: From Politics to Health

  • II. Are Tumors “Conscious”?

    • Agents and Homunculi: Does it Take a Village to Make a Conscious Organism?

      From one biological perspective, a multicellular organism such as a person is better seen as a relatively stable community of semi-autonomous cellular agents, with agendas of their own; this huge population of cells (having thousands or even millions of distinct genomes) normally manages to hold it together for decades. How can an aggregation of trillions of selfish, myopic cells discover...

    • How Machine Intelligence Could Accelerate Holographic Medical Imaging

      This talk is a short primer on the evolution from classical statistical analysis through machine learning and ultimately toward Artificial General Intelligence. With this in mind, Craig will demonstrate new ways of doing holographic medical imaging and explain how these techniques can be put into production in the future by exploiting these evolving capabilities in machine intelligence. He will demonstrate...

    • Translating Cancer Biology into Novel Therapies

      RalA and RalB are small GTPases that support malignant development and progression in experimental models of lung, pancreatic, colon, prostate, and bladder cancer. However, demonstration of their clinical relevance in human tumors remained lacking. Hence, we developed tools to evaluate Ral protein expression, activation, and transcriptional output and evaluated their association with clinicopathologic parameters in common human tumor types. To...

    • Epigenetic Programs and Cancer Progression

      The current interest in sequencing the genomes of cancer cells has distracted attention away from the role of epigenetic programs, which may in the end be responsible for the lion’s share of distinct cancer cell-associated phenotypes. One type of epigenetic program derives from differentiation programs of the normal cells-of-origin of cancer cells, which continue to influence the phenotypes of derived...

  • III. Thinking Big While Laughing

    • Design, Construction, and Analysis of a Minimal Bacterial Cell

      Clyde’s team used whole-genome design and complete chemical synthesis to minimize the 1079–kilobase pair synthetic genome of Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0. An initial design, based on collective knowledge of molecular biology combined with limited transposon mutagenesis data, failed to produce a viable cell. Improved transposon mutagenesis methods revealed a class of quasi-essential genes that are needed for robust -growth, explaining the...

    • Carl Woese and the Non-Tree of Life

      Carl R. Woese, of Urbana, Illinois, was the man who invented molecular phylogenetics. Although famous to researchers in molecular evolution and microbiology—revered by many, suspect to some—he remains almost entirely unknown to the general public. Even among organismic biologists, ecologists, and evolutionary biologists who study flora and fauna, the name Woese draws a blank. He is arguably, as I’ve often...

    • The Value of Medicaid: Trends and Threats in 2018

      What are the market, policy, and financing trends that will impact how states manage Medicaid in 2018 and beyond? How are states connecting the need for health care coverage with improving the overall health of a community? How are changing demographics and the graying of Colorado impacting the services and expenses associated with our Medicaid program? What has been the impact of...

    • ‘Who the Hell Ate All the Frozen Neutrons?’ and Other Hilarious Adventures

      When it’s not too busy being utterly pointless and depressing, The Universe can be funny; really, really, really funny. Just when everything makes sense, nature throws pi in your face, and it turns out we’ve got it all backwards, inside-out, and need to start over from scratch.  Sometimes the best solution is to just sit back and enjoy the joke we call “reality.”...

  • IV. Health for All of Us

    • Stunting, Caused by Chronic Hunger and Malnutrition, is a Crime Against Humanity

      Thirty seven percent of the children under the age of 5 in rural Africa are stunted due to chronic hunger and malnutrition. Improving the nutrition of the fundamental food system of Africa, which has not been studied by science, and the translation to scale are crucial to eradicating stunting.

      The African Orphan Crop Consortium (AOCC) is an uncommon collaboration which...

    • Disruptive Discoveries for HIV, HCV, and HBV Infections

      HIV and Hepatitis B and C (HBV and HCV, respectively) viruses cause significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. HCV and HBV kill more people annually than the next 60 reportable infectious diseases combined. HCV related deaths have set new records in every year since at least 2003. The continued rise is alarming given that the vast majority of these deaths are...

    • Unencumbered

      Calvin Trillin will discuss his experiences in medicine as a patient, an observer, and a diagnostician who is unencumbered by medical training.

    • A Life Everlasting

      When Sarah Gray received the devastating news that her unborn twin son Thomas was diagnosed with anencephaly, a terminal condition that meant he would not survive long beyond birth, she decided she wanted his death—and life—to have meaning. In the weeks before she gave birth to her sons in 2010, she arranged to donate Thomas’s organs to medical research.  Later...