Princeton University

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY IS a private coeducational research university located in Princeton, New Jersey. It is one of eight universities that belong to the Ivy League. Originally founded at Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it relocated to Princeton in 1756 and was renamed Princeton University in 1896. Princeton was the fourth institution of higher education in the United States to conduct classes. Princeton has never had any official religious affiliation, which is rare among American universities of its age. At one time, it had close ties to the Presbyterian Church, but today, it is nonsectarian and makes no religious demands on its students. The university has ties with the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the Westminster Choir College of Rider University. Princeton has traditionally focused on undergraduate education and academic research, though in recent decades, it has increased its focus on graduate education and offers a large number of professional master's degrees and Ph.D. programs in a range of subjects.

The Department of Molecular Biology is a center for research in the life sciences at Princeton University. Housed mainly in four adjacent and connected buildings, it is home to 50 faculty and associated faculty, 120 graduate students, 130 postdoctoral fellows, 100 undergraduate majors, and 100 technical and administrative staff. The Commission on Science and Technology of the State of New Jersey received 71 complete applications for its $5 million Stem Cell Research Grant program, including proposals from private life science companies as well as New Jersey's research universities and nonprofit institutions. The Commission has awarded stem cell research grants to 17 scientists, including Tom Shenk and Kateri Moore of the Department of Molecular Biology. The grants from the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology will further work in the field of stem cell advancements that began at Princeton more than 25 years ago. Two of the university's grant recipients, molecular biologists Ihor Lemischka and Kateri Moore, continue exploring the cutting edge of stem cell research. Collaborative efforts with electrical engineer Ron Weiss are attempting to program embryonic stem cells to “fix” disease. The third grant recipient, molecular biologist Thomas Shenk, will focus on producing stem cells from human umbilical cord blood.

Lemischka has been studying stem cells at Princeton for 20 years and has remained one of the world's leading innovators in the research since he was the first to show, in the 1980s, that a single blood—producing stem cell in bone marrow, known as a hematopoietic stem cell, could rebuild the entire blood system in a mouse whose blood system had been destroyed. Lemischka and colleagues, working in collaboration with scientists at the University of Pennsylvania led by G. Christian Overton, created a “library” of gene fragments from blood stem cells of mice. They also created a library of genes from a sample of mature blood cells that had been depleted of stem cells. They then “subtracted” the two libraries, removing the majority of commonly expressed “housekeeping” genes while enriching for those that are preferentially expressed in the immature stem cells. By analyzing the DNA sequences in the “subtracted” library using sophisticated computational techniques and comparing them to the sequences of many other genes and proteins, they were able to identify more than 2,000 genes that are likely to be active in stem cells. The approach is far more comprehensive than previous techniques, which typically involve finding an animal that has a stem cell disorder and looking for the gene mutation that causes it, or which focus on small numbers of genes [Page 442]previously identified in other systems. In addition to yielding a wealth of new genetic information, the research demonstrates an innovative approach to collecting, analyzing and presenting the data.

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