Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addresses a Masur Auditorium audience Nov. 8.

We have the power to eliminate a deadly pandemic that has plagued the world for the last 30 years. Working together, we can create an “AIDS-free generation.” That’s what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced at NIH on Nov. 8.

“AIDS is still an incurable disease, but it no longer has to be a death sentence,” Clinton declared. “Today, thanks both to new knowledge and to new ways of applying it, we have the chance to give countless lives and futures to millions of people who are alive today, but equally—if not more importantly—to an entire generation yet to be born.”

Dr. Antonios Mikos

If you ever want to gain a fresh appreciation of how well made the human body is, try building replacement parts for missing or damaged elements of the original equipment. It will require all the biology, chemistry, physics and engineering you can marshal, and then some.

In a recent Wednesday Afternoon Lecture he titled “Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering,” Dr. Antonios G. Mikos, professor in the department of bioengineering at Rice University, gave an overview of a “relatively young field” that has been around for only 20 years or so.