Inaugurated fifty years ago as a key component in the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge National Laboratory remains one of the nation's premier research institutions. This profusely illustrated volume, written for a non-scientific readership, chronicles the history of the laboratory from its origins to the present day. Leland Johnson and Daniel Schaffer begin their narrative in 1943 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built ORNL in the hills of East Tennessee to produce plutonium for atomic weapons. After World War II, ORNL became a center for fundamental scientific research under the successive...

Although embryonic stem cells currently enjoy the public limelight and show great pr- ise for cell based medical therapies, it is the adult stem cells which are responsible for the body's natural ability to fght disease, heal and recover, or fail and succumb to various maladies. The study of mammalian adult stem cells has surged recently, most likely from a maturation of stem cell studies in the classical developmental model organisms and in hematopoeisis. All the tissues of the body examined so far are generated and regenerated from stem cells, it has been an important frst step to adapt or...