Begley’s piece then takes a political twist (the only apparent peg for the story, though it appears down low) with the mention that “The next administration and Congress have a chance to change that, radically revamping the nation’s biomedical research system by creating what proponents … call a ‘center for cures’ at NIH. The center would house multidisciplinary teams of biologists, chemists, technicians and others who would take a discovery such as Keirstead’s and nurture it along to the point where a company is willing to put up the hundreds of millions of dollars to test it in patients.”

Whether or not that idea will come to fruition remains to be seen. According to the Democrat and Chronicle in New York, however, the University of Rochester is building a $76.4 million Clinical and Translational Science Institute that will be the “first building of its kind in the nation.”

At any rate, both the Times and Newsweek deserve credit for drawing attention to these rather profound changes in the fields of genomics and biomedical research. Without immediate and obvious news pegs, these wide-angle, forward-looking stories are not easy to tell in the modern media climate, yet the emerging trends expressed therein are likely to one day have significant impacts on human health.

• 1
• 2