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Please contact Development Manager, Christopher Rhodes, at 312.503.1816 if you have any questions.

Upcoming events

    • September 07, 2010
    • 05:00 PM - 08:00 PM
    • Northwestern University, Chicago Campus Baldwin Auditorium 303 East Superior Street

    On April 20, 2010 the explosion and sinking of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico marked the beginning of what would become the worst environmental disaster in US History. With an estimated 215 million gallons of crude oil spewed into the gulf over an 87 day period, the devastation to the regions wildlife is unparalleled. Although clean-up options are in full swing, marine and plant life are suffering in a region that many fear will never be the same again.


    • September 21, 2010
    • 05:00 PM
    • Illinois Institute of Technology

    Tuesday, September 21, 2010
    Illinois Institute of Technology
    McCormick Tribune Campus Center
    McCloska Auditorium
    3201 South State Street

    5 p.m.  Reception & Registration
    6 p.m.  Presentation

    $10 Advance Reg / $15 Door (day of) / $5 Students

    Free for C²ST Members.

    By the year 2035, it is estimated that our world’s dependent relationship with liquid fossil fuels will reach a staggering 110 million barrels a day, with the largest increase in consumption coming from the current developing world. Increased concern over global climate change and rising competition for dwindling fossil fuel resources will require scientifically advanced and environmentally friendly solutions to solve our worsening energy supply problems.

    To answer this call for innovation, the U.S. Department of Energy is currently funding two major initiatives at Argonne National Laboratory. One, an Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC), addresses our fundamental understanding of alternative liquid fuels. The other seeks to create scientifically viable products for large-scale fossil fuel replacement that are both sustainable and have near zero negative environmental impact.

    Join C2ST as Argonne National Laboratory’s Director Dr. Eric Isaacs and Doctors Seth Snyder & Christopher Marshall discuss Argonne’s current research and the scientific advances that are helping make Future Fuels a reality of today’s world.

    • November 16, 2010
    • 05:00 PM
    • Northwestern University's Chicago Campus
    The Chicago Council on Science and Technology & Children's Memorial Research Center Present:

    Lecture and book signing with author Rebecca Skloot
    The Immortal Life of HEnrietta LAcks

    Tuesday November 16, 2010
    Northwestern University
    Chicago Campus
    Thorne Auditorium
    375 East Chicago Ave.

    Discounted parking is available to the first 150 attendees at the 222 E. Huron St. garage.

    5pm Members-Only Reception
    ** TO BECOME A MEMBER CLICK HERE**
    6pm Presentation - book signing to follow

    $20 for Members - $30 Non-Members

    Rebecca Skloot


        Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

    Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live, and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

    Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

    Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?

    • December 09, 2010
    • 05:00 PM
    • Northwestern University's Chicago Campus
    Chicago's Dark Matter: WIMPs of the underground

    Thursday December 9, 2010

    Northwestern University
    Chicago Campus
    Hughes Auditorium
    303 East Superior

    5pm Reception & Registration
    6pm Presentation followed by Q&A

    $10 Advance Reg / $15 Door / $5 Student

    Dr. Juan Collar
    Dr. Rocky Kolb
    Dr. Carlos Wagner


    The next decade will be the decade of the WIMP, the best candidate for dark matter. Astronomers tell us dark matter exists, as well as how much there is. Cosmologists have a simple, elegant, compelling explanation for dark matter: a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) that was produced in the primordial soup. If WIMPs are the dark matter, we should be on the threshold of producing them at accelerators like CERN or Fermilab, or detecting the relic WIMPs underground. We should soon know if WIMPs are the answer, or just another simple, elegant, and compelling, but wrong, explanation.

 
© Chicago Council on Science and Technology