"To fulfill our potential for innovation and leadership, we must set a bold agenda, one that embraces the excitement of a grand vision in which disease-based discovery translates into improved health care. To achieve that goal we should aspire to a community in which scientists, physician-scientists and scholars, and certainly students are focused on this task as its highest priority."

Paul Berg
Awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry
The Robert W. and Vivian K. Cahill
Professor of Cancer Research, Emeritus
Director emeritus, the Beckman Center for
Molecular and Genetic Medicine

While progress in improving human health in the last 100 years has been astonishing, the issues we face today have increased in complexity and magnitude—the emergence of avian flu and new bacterial viruses, the limitations of known antibiotic therapies, the ongoing challenges of chronic disease, and autoimmune disease, for example. Progress in the next 100 years will require marshaling the expertise of researchers from a variety of disciplines and expediting the translation of discoveries from the laboratory to the patient's bedside. These are the goals behind Stanford's Initiative on Human Health.

Discover more about the human health initiative in action on the Stanford Story Bank.

Stanford on iTunes U offers a wide range of Stanford Challenge–related digital audio, including programs about the Initiative on Human Health. Requires iTunes. More >>