The mission of the Gerstner Sloan-Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences is to advance the frontiers of knowledge by providing to gifted and creative students in an interactive, innovative, and collegial environment the education and training they need to make new discoveries in the biological sciences.

Much of the recent explosion in new knowledge about normal biological functions and disease is rooted in fundamental laboratory discoveries. Contributions to our understanding of human disease, including cancer, have come from many disciplines -- genetics, cell biology, structural biology, immunology, and developmental biology, among others.

The prospects for designing new interventions utilizing the modern tools of cell and molecular biology are enormous. And the rules -- whether one is talking about infectious, metabolic, neurological diseases, or cancer -- are the same: understand the disease process at the cellular level; identify the genes involved and their protein products; and focus on these molecules to prevent or reverse the disease with new drugs, vaccines, or other approaches.

We are at the beginning of this journey, harnessing our burgeoning new knowledge and bringing it from the laboratory into clinical practice. But we are only at the beginning. We need to train the next generation of scientists who are passionate about attacking problems in human disease through basic research.

With an outstanding scientific faculty, an acclaimed clinical faculty, and ongoing basic science research linked to disease-relevant models, the Gerstner Sloan-Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences is ideally positioned to offer this training. The scientific enterprise is wonderful and ennobling. It embodies a great adventure. We invite you to join us.