2012

David Dinges, Ph.D., professor of Psychology in Psychiatry, has been working with NASA for more than 20 years on one of the most challenging problems of space exploration: how to keep astronauts alert, active, and able to do their enormously complex and dangerous jobs in the most extreme conditions human beings will ever face.

The old formula was raise the "good" cholesterol and lower the "bad." Thanks to Daniel J. Rader, M.D., we now know it's more complicated than that. For example, he's shown that it's not certain that all HDLs of any type are good. And he's investigating the "efflux" process, which he believes makes HDL protective.

Until recently, scientists believed that gene mutations were the only source of human diseases — but it turns out to be more complicated. As Shelley Berger, Ph.D., director of the Penn Epigenetics Program, explains, "Epigenetics is a layer of regulation over our genes that is key to how genes are turned on and off."