John Gearhart Interview (page: 6 / 6) Stem Cell Research	Print Interview

There is no ban on what you're doing. Is that because your cells cannot create a baby?

John Gearhart: That's right. These cells are not what we call "totipotent." Now we learn the power of a word. "Totipotent" has two biologic meanings. In one it means that a cell or a nucleus can form all other cell types that are found in an animal. An alternative term is "pluripotent" which means it can form most cells.

It is written in our federal law that if a cell is totipotent it also means it can form a whole organism or a whole being. Embryonic stem cells are not totipotent. There are certain cell types it cannot form. For example, if you took an embryonic stem cell and placed it into the uterus of a woman nothing would happen. These cells are incapable of forming the extra embryonic cells that are critical for organizing an embryo and having it implant into the uterine wall. It won't do it. So what you get are just a variety of cell types that are not organized into an embryo.

So our cells are pluripotent. They can form virtually any cell type you find in the adult, but they can't form some of the essential cell types that you find in embryos or fetuses. That is are important terms you see in the literature, and people are arguing about that. Anyway, the cloning issue came up because of this nuclear transfer step to match an embryonic stem cell to a potential host.

Are you cloning that cell in a sense then?

John Gearhart: Yes, cloning cells. You're not cloning individuals. Cloning has so many meanings now, but to the public it only means one thing: producing a genetically identical individual.

Now am I opposed to human cloning? Two thoughts on that. I'm not opposed to this. This may be startling to you but I'll tell you why in the long-term. We'll get to the short-term.

Every day in this country there are at least 30 clones born. Okay. Do people get upset about this? No. And these are identical twins. Okay. People say, "Well, they resemble each other," blah, blah, blah. But these are individuals, totally different as you could imagine.

And what the public doesn't understand is that you're not cloning individuals. You're cloning what we call a genome. DNA. That not an individual. An individual is something that arises from all of the interactions and environmental things that happen along the way to establish individual identity.

Do I care in the long-term? This isn't going to be done in any mass scale in any way.

In the short-term human cloning does bother me and I'll tell you why. Whether you want to talk about Dolly the Sheep, whether you want to talk about the cattle cloning, or whether you want to talk about the mouse cloning, these are the species in which cloning has been done.

There are clearly problems with these cloned animals. Dolly has shortened telomere cells. Now this is a big term for saying that it seems that this animal is aging more rapidly than normal.

In not only the sheep work but in the cattle work it's clear that animals are being born and they're dying mysteriously. Or if you look along the fetal period of the ones that are lost, you find that there's some birth defects in there.

The frequency of success here is so low by these procedures, --one in hundreds -- that this just isn't time to apply this to humans in any fashion, in any way. We have a lot of questions that we've got to work through. That's my take on this at the moment.

There's sort of a hysteria around this subject anyway?

John Gearhart: Yes. I think there should be. I think there should be a real concern about the biology and the outcome of this. No, this shouldn't be done. I don't care. Whatever.

There are ethical issues, aside from any of the biological concerns, which I think we have to deal with.

And then there's this final little issue over here that we've talked about which is called therapeutic cloning. The other things are reproductive cloning, where you want an individual.

We've introduced this new concept of therapeutic cloning, which is getting stem cells with the same genome in them. This is the area that the public doesn't understand as well. You can't blame them. I don't think we've done a very good job of informing them.

One question that we ask all of our subjects concerns the American dream. What does the American dream mean to you?

John Gearhart: That's a very deep question as far as I'm concerned. I think of the freedom that I've had in my life to do what I wanted to do, and when I wanted to do it, without having to worry about a class consciousness, without having to worry about a number of other issues. There's nowhere else in the world that I could have done or can do what I want to do.

And to have the support at the federal levels, the environment of having access to colleagues, of having opportunities. To me this is part of that American dream, and very important to me, as you can tell by my bio in a way. You can come from nowhere and not have any additional obstacles placed in your way that would have prevented you from getting to where you want to go. That is what I view as the American dream.

What to you is the most significant contribution that you have made so far to your field? What are you most proud of?

John Gearhart: What I'm most proud of, I think, are the students and the post-docs and fellows who have come out of my laboratory. I've followed their careers. I think my main contribution will come through them ultimately. As I said in the beginning, I think as a scientist it's really the journey, and sometimes when you achieve the goals of the journey, you do it with your students and your fellows.

Through mentorship you get very close to these individuals. They put all of their trust in you at least for a while. It's like a family. Then when they get mature enough they turn around and say, "Yeah, we know, old man." But that's okay. This gives me the most delight and I think it would probably be the lasting contribution.

Science and scientific findings are ephemeral. What makes a headline one day is gone, and the half life of a research paper is extremely short, so I think it's these kinds of connections that are critical. It's the students and the fellows.

Thank you so much for speaking with us.

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