Imagine being able to look into a crystal ball to see what the new millennium holds for science and medicine. Will gene therapy revolutionize the way physicians treat disease? Will police officers arrive at crime scenes sporting hand-held DNA sequencers? Will people be living on Mars�and facing a unique set of biomedical challenges? Will xenotransplantation, cloning, and tissue engineering offer solutions to today�s shortage of available organs? Will individuals routinely carry a CD-rom of their genetic blueprints to their doctor's appointments and pharmacists?

The Whitehead Institute's fifth annual press seminar, "Beyond the Scientific Frontier," offers an opportunity to gaze into that crystal ball. Leading scientists will share their predictions about the hottest tends at the frontier of biomedicine and separate myth from reality. As the enclosed program details, the speakers include Robert Langer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Valina Dawson of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Richard Mulligan of Children's Hospital. Richard Young, George Daley, Paul Matsudaira, and Rudolf Jaenisch -- all of the Whitehead Institute -- will also share their insights about such cutting-edge topics as DNA arrays, stem cells, forensics, and cloning.

The featured lunch speaker will be Eric Lander, Director of the Whitehead Institute's Center for Genome Research. Dr. Lander will describe the challenges of sequencing the human genome, as well as the road ahead for the growing field of genomics. The day will culminate with a tour of Whitehead's sequencing center -- the largest publicly funded center in the world�where you'll have the opportunity to see firsthand a state-of-the-art biology lab of the 21st century.

We expect an impressive audience of reporters and science writers from newspapers, magazines, and journals, including your colleagues from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Newsweek, ABC, and NBC. We hope to add your name to the list.

The press seminar, to be held on May 10, 2000, at the Whitehead Institute, will also provide a scientific grounding for the current policy debates, which will be the focus of the Whitehead Policy Symposium on May 11-12. Please call Gus Cervini at 617-258-0633 for more information about registration for the policy symposium.