This volume presents reports from three recent scientific meetings on special topics.
The first report discusses scientific perspectives on individuals' drive to consume, presented at the conference "The Interdisciplinary Science of Consumption: Mechanisms of Allocating Resources Across Disciplines" at the University of Michigan in May 2010. Sponsored by Rackham Graduate School and the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan, the conference included presentations on human, primate, and rodent models and spanned multiple domains of consumption, including reward seeking, delay discounting, food-sharing reciprocity, and the consumption and display of material possessions across the life span.
The next report comes from the one-day symposium by the Centre for Immunity, Infection, and Evolution (CIIE) entitled "Wild Immunology," held at the University of Edinburgh, UK in June 2011. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the CIIE aims to connect evolutionary biology and ecology with research in immunology and infectious diseases in order to gain an interdisciplinary perspective on challenges to global health. The central question of the symposium was "Why should we try to understand infection and immunity in wild systems?" Specifically, presenters explored how the immune response operates in the wild and how multiple coinfections and commensalism affect immune responses and host health in these wild systems. The symposium brought together a broad program of speakers, ranging from laboratory immunologists to infectious disease ecologists, working on wild birds, feral animals, wild and laboratory rodents, and on questions ranging from the dynamics of coinfection to how commensal bacteria affect the development of the immune system.
The final report discusses the work presented at "Advancing Drug Discovery for Schizophrenia," a conference sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences and with support from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Life Technologies Foundation, and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. The meeting, at the New York Academy of Sciences in March of 2011, included individual talks and panel discussions and highlighted basic, clinical, and translational research approaches, all of which contribute to the overarching goal of enhancing the pharmaceutical armamentarium for treating schizophrenia. The meeting report surveys work by the vanguard of schizophrenia research in such topics as genetic and epigenetic approaches, small molecule therapeutics, and the relationships between target genes, neuronal function, and symptoms of schizophrenia.
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