A group of business, government, environmental and academic leaders convened in a dialogue by the Aspen Institute proposed a series of actions to promote the widespread commercialization of both corn and cellulosic ethanol to improve energy security, the environment, and the economy. Co-chaired by Booz Allen Hamilton Vice President and former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and former Congressman Tom Ewing (R. IL), they developed a series of recommendations involving improved crop yields, processing of biomass into ethanol, manufacture of more cars that can burn either ethanol or gasoline, and the provision of ethanol pumps at more filling stations. Their report, "A High Growth Strategy for Ethanol, includes a discussion of the potential of ethanol, the group's recommendations, and a series of discussion papers commissioned for the dialogue.

This funding was support for student and postdoctoral attendance at the Annual Recomb Conference from 2001 to 2005. The RECOMB Conference series was founded in 1997 to provide a scientific forum for theoretical advances in computational biology and their applications in molecular biology and medicine. The conference series aims at attracting research contributions in all areas of computational molecular biology. Typical, but not exclusive, the topics of interest are: Genomics, Molecular sequence analysis, Recognition of genes and regulatory elements, Molecular evolution, Protein structure, Structural genomics, Gene Expression, Gene Networks, Drug Design, Combinatorial libraries, Computational proteomics, and Structural and functional genomics. The origins of the conference came from the mathematical and computational side of the field, and there remains to be a certain focus on computational advances. However, the effective use of computational techniques to biological innovation is also an important aspect of the conference. The conference had a growing number of attendees, topping 300 in recent years and often exceeding 500. The conference program includes between 30 and 40 contributed papers, that are selected by a international program committee with around 30 experts during a rigorous review process rivaling the editorial procedure for top-rate scientific journals. In previous years papers …