One of the educational institutions I have been lucky enough to cover while I lived in Missouri was Washington University in St. Louis. It is an amazing research institution, not only in medical technology, but in other disciplines as well. Even more than that, it is a private institution. We had some intriguing news out of St. Louis a couple of days ago, but this is really EXCITING (pardon the caps, but this got my geek on). Wash. U., which us locals calls it, has mapped the maize genome!!!!

Kid you not! Ok, so if you are not a plant geek like me this might not be so exciting, but Maize is a plant that is pervasive throughout our food supply, not only as canned sweet corn, cereal, and feed, but broken down to its chemical constituents and used for everything from additives in food to plastics. I got totally hooked at looking for corn in my food labels after reading Michael Pollans great new book The Omnivores Dilemma that my friends Shaun and Miranda gave me for Yule.