Stem cell pioneer does a reality check

Thomson: It’s a long-term process to really characterize these lines well. The existing cell lines have been around for seven years, and people are gearing up to want to do clinical trials. They’ve been arguing with the FDA all this time over the original cell lines. Well, that means we want the new cell lines now for some therapy that’s going to be 10 years out.

A three-year difference could really hurt people now, because the [culture] media has gotten qualitatively different. Just deriving the same old cell lines with the same problems made no sense to me, but once those conditions are really defined and safe, then it makes sense to go back and derive more. So I hope public policy allows that.

Current public policy in theory allows it, because you are allowed to use private funding, but the reality is that the federal government, the National Institutes of Health, is the funding that drives basic research and research into new therapies in this country. And if you exclude that, then you’re basically stuck. …

Q: How do you respond to the claim that we have these other sources of stem cells — adult stem cells or cord blood — and there’s no need to turn to embryonic cells?

A: We don’t. The most studied cell in the whole body, in terms of stem cells, is the hematopoietic stem cell. It can’t be grown. So what you do when you do a bone marrow transplant is you take some bone marrow out of you — actually, we do peripheral blood — and we put in another patient without expanding it. There’s a clinical need for that expansion step, but it can’t be done right now. And hundreds of labs for 30 years have studied that adult stem cell, and that’s the one we know the most about.

If you go to these other ones, most of them are known by indirect methods, and nobody can actually isolate and expand and grow them in useful ways. But we can already make blood in very reasonable quantities from human embryonic cells. …

So if you think about particular things, you can find a stem cell that might work for that application, but this ability to expand these cells in an unlimited, stable developmental state is essentially unprecedented among stem cells. … People can do mesenchymal stem cells [from bone marrow] pretty well, and neural stem cells kind of well, but neural stem cells is a good example. If you try to make dopaminergic neurons from fetal neural stem cells, you get a burst of that activity, and it goes away. Nobody’s been able to sustainably make dopaminergic neurons from an adult stem cell, or a fetal one, period — whereas with embryonic cells you can do it already. Over time that might change. But a lot of good groups have tried very hard and failed, to date.

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And again, getting back to the basic science thing: If we study the embryonic stem cells, we learn the basic science. That knowledge is just as likely to be applied to adult stem cells as to the embryonic stem cells. The knowledge goes back and forth. And in the case of the blood, people have failed at growing that cell for three decades. Well, studying that lineage with embryonic stem cells, we might learn the clues to make it growable, and it might be that we still want to use adult stem cells to do that because there are a lot of advantages to that, but the knowledge might come from embryonic stem cells.

This divide about adult vs. embryonic, it’s a political debate, it’s not a scientific debate. Scientists choose the model for a question that fits the question. … So people who have focused on adult stem cells historically are using embryonic stem cells now. It doesn’t mean that’s what they think will be the therapy, but they see it as a more useful model to understand the questions they want to ask. …

Q: Thinking back to when you did your first work with embryonic stem cells, did you have any expectations about how things would look seven or 10 years later? And how has the reality matched those expectations?

A: Dolly had just been published, so I knew this would be a media thing. But the thing that has most surprised me is how long the media attention has lasted.

It’s been seven years now: Get over it. We derived a few cell lines, and that’s kind of neat, but what I anticipated is that there would be this media storm that would last, I don’t know, three to six months. And then people would just get on with their lives and do something else, because they have short attention spans. But it’s seven years in now, and it’s still this lively topic of discussion.

A lot has to do with the fact that we have this particular president. I think if the political process were just a little bit different, we wouldn’t even be talking today.

What do you think? Share your opinion on stem cell research with Cosmic Log.

An earlier version of this report referred incorrectly to the timing of the first reports about the cloning of Dolly the sheep.

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