One of the most significant recent developments in recent years has been Maldacena's elaboration of the long suspected gravity/gauge theory correspondence. Roughly, Maldacena's conjecture relates string theory on a curved spacetime to a supersymmetric conformal gauge theory on its boundary. Yet, if this correspondence is to desdribe the real world, we need to be able to relate string theory to some non-conformal, non-supersymmetric boundary theory (QCD comes to mind). In this talk, we describe in, hopefully a very elementary way, some of the most recent steps that have been taken in this direction.