Stem cell pioneer does a reality check

Q: Then there’s the issue of interstate and international competitiveness: Sometimes you get the feeling that there’s a race to capitalize on this technology, and then you have the countervailing moral arguments. It’s easy to get into this situation where you feel like “we’re going to have one hand tied behind our back, because the South Koreans or the British have this line…” I assume that you view it differently?

A: Well, yes and no. There is some advantage about people being worried about the rest of the world getting ahead of us in this. I’d still say that most of the decent papers come out of the United States, but that’s changing. Britain, for example, has these very liberal policies, but they’re implemented in a way that’s actually slowed them down, and they don’t have a lot of money to do it. So in spite of these liberal policies, it’s still not this golden place to do stem cell research. In Asia, Korea and Singapore are making major investments in this area, and China too. California managed to get the money flowing from Proposition 71. That’ll make a big difference. So competition does ultimately make the world go round on one level or another, and that’s not a bad thing, I guess.

Q: Does that enter into the argument over what sorts of procedures would be acceptable for pursuing this?

A: It certainly should. The United States is just odd. Basically, if you do things with federal money, you’re pretty restricted in what you can do. If you do things with private money, you can do whatever you please, even things that would offend most people. So it doesn’t appear to me that it represents sound public policy.

Q: In terms of stem cell technology, there was an advance in getting beyond the mouse feeder cells, but there are still some animal components that need to be used to support human embryonic stem cells. Do you think that problem is solvable?

A: I think there are going to be a couple of things that will ultimately change federal policy, though we might have to wait for three years. One is that my group and quite a few other groups are developing culture conditions that are much better than the original culture conditions. … My prediction is, within the next year there will be at least one and probably several publications demonstrating that: completely defined conditions, no animal products, no feeder layers of either human or animal origins.

The other thing, which is already happening, is that more and more clinically relevant lineages are being published. People have published work with dopaminergic neurons, motor neurons, heart cells – quite a list now. That means that although we’re not ready to put these cells into patients yet, the clock is ticking.

And the original cell lines, while they can be put into patients if you jump through enough hoops, they’re clearly not the safest things there, because no matter how much testing you do, you might have missed something. If you derive stem cells from day one in completely defined conditions, in the appropriate GLP [Good Laboratory Practice] conditions, there’s simply going to be a higher level of safety. So if I were a patient – say, 10 years down the line when the therapies come on board – which cell line would I want? I wouldn’t want the original ones.

‘In a kind of “silver lining to the dark cloud” thing, it’s almost better that Bush was elected.’ — James Thompson Stem-cell researcher

When we derived those original cell lines, I was very consciously making them just for experimental purposes, because I figured other people would derive them under these GLP conditions and I wouldn’t have to deal with that. We’d just do the experiments. Little did I know that we’d be stuck with these cell lines.

It hasn’t bothered me yet, because we didn’t really know how to make them better. But the field is changing now. We’re getting very close to where we can make them under completely defined conditions. And as I said, I suspect there will be multiple people publishing on that. So I hope that that will drive the political process. Congress now is attempting to pass this law to derive more cell lines from these existing embryos, and I hope President Bush can actually consider changing that veto.

In the first four years, it was entirely about the basic science. Although a lot of the scientists have been very vocal about the compromise [announced in August 2001], I’ve been kind of quiet about it. And the reason is that, in a kind of “silver lining to the dark cloud” thing, it’s almost better that Bush was elected. I don’t know how to say this without offending someone, but it’s a little bit like Nixon going to China. Nixon didn’t suddenly become a Communist.

President Clinton did not fund this research. It’s nice to yell at the Republicans, but moderate Republicans have been some of the biggest supporters of this. Even though it’s a compromise, and even though the compromise does not represent good public policy, it got the field going, it got federal funding going for the first time. Scientists suddenly knew that if there was a change in administration, it wouldn’t stop – whereas if Bush didn’t allow it to go forward, the policy could flip-flop every time a Democrat or a Republican takes the White House. So even though we have to go beyond that policy, it did get the field started, and I think that’s a positive way of looking at it.

During that first four years, it probably didn’t hurt things that much – it did create this funny bottleneck about cell lines, which did slow things down, and that’s unfortunate. But going forward another three years, it could actually hurt people. Just because it’s going to take us 10 years to derive these new therapies doesn’t mean we don’t want to have the cell lines now.

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