The Workshop on Health and Medicine is one of six workshops held as part of “Challenges for the Chemical Sciences in the 21st Century.” The workshop topics reflect areas of societal need—materials, energy and transportation, national security and homeland defense, health and medicine, information and communications, and environment. The charge for each workshop was to address the four themes of discovery, interfaces, challenges, and infrastructure as they relate to the workshop topic:

• Discovery—major discoveries or advances in the chemical sciences during the last several decades;
• Interfaces—interfaces that exist between chemistry and chemical engineering and such areas as biology, environmental science, materials science, medicine, and physics;
• Challenges—the grand challenges that exist in the chemical sciences today; and
• Infrastructure—infrastructure that will be required to allow the potential of future advances in the chemical sciences to be realized.