The house that JAK/STAT built

An international workshop on "Cytokines, Signaling and the Jak/Stat Pathway' organized by Peter C. Heinrich of the Klinikum der RWTH Aachen under the auspices of DFG-Forschergruppe was held in Aachen, Germany, on 4-5 October 1996. In this review David Levy notes that even though some diagrams shown at the meeting displayed more arrows than there were meeting participants, remarkable progress has been made in the unraveling of the complexities of cytokine signal transduction. The central issue in the field of cytokine signaling is specificity, and this issue was addressed through experimental results from biochemical, molecular, and genetic studies of signal transduction pathways.