James Thomson Interview (page: 3 / 8) Father of Stem Cell Research	Print Interview

It seems to be the case very often in science, that researchers working miles apart get the same results at virtually the same time. Why is that?

James Thomson: I don't know.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It seems that some things are just ready, you know. There's enough infrastructure of ideas that that next step is almost inevitable. And it's often two people on the other side of the world that do it on almost the same day. And it happens fairly routinely. It's curious. So in this case Junying Yu published very similar cells from a different source within a week. And then more recently, Shinya Yamanaka did a reprogramming paper which came out on the exact same day as ours. And usually that happens often.

Were the possible applications of stem cell work to medical research immediately clear?

James Thomson: Yeah.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think if you looked at original primate work, we pretty much laid out all the stuff that people have been saying. I mean, there's fairly simple categories. One is it gives you access to the human body, which I think is a big one. It's not transplantation. It means that you can study the development and functions of all the bits of the human body for the first time. That's the big deal. And one of the things you can use that for is drug screening. Another thing you can use that for is transplantation. And that was pretty obvious from the beginning that all that was true.

Stem cell research offers some hope for understanding diseases like Huntington's and Parkinson's, doesn't it? Could you explain that?

James Thomson: Yeah, so there's hope, which has been kind of hyped in the press for transplantation for all range of diseases, including neurological diseases like you just mentioned.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think it's good to be skeptical. I think that there's going to be tremendous parallels between the early days of recombinant DNA and what's happening in stem cell biology, because there was the same kind of social uproar in the early '70s, followed by legislation and compromise and getting on with it. And people predicted things like gene therapy would be here, right? And it's not yet. And I think if you think about all the things that were said about gene therapy over the year, and put stem cell transplantation in the paragraphs, they're the same thing almost. It's not to say that they won't be useful in that way, either gene therapy or transplantation, it's just going to take a lot longer than people are letting on at the moment. That being said, with the recombinant DNA, people underanticipated how it completely revolutionized all of biology and medicine. It's a research tool that's pervasive everywhere, and including fields that we had no anticipation that that would happen.

Do you think that stem cell research will have an impact comparable to that of DNA?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. James Thomson: It's going to be a pervasive tool that anybody that's interested in the human body and human medicine is going to use. And they won't call them "stem cell biologists" anymore, it'd just be a tool they happen to use, as many other tools. And I think that's going to change human medicine a lot more than this transplantation, because for Parkinson's, for example, there are people that think that transplanting dopaminergic neurons -- that's the neuron that dies in Parkinson's -- will treat or cure that disease. I hope they're right, but there's a good chance that's going to be very hard. Nonetheless, this is the first time we had those neurons in our hands. And it means that we can finally figure out why they're dying. And if you understand why they're dying in the first place, then you shouldn't have to do something as crude as transplanting cells back into the human brain. Hopefully, something like a small molecule will arrest the progression of the disease once we understand the mechanism. So while I'm skeptical whether transplantation will happen anytime soon, I'm not at all skeptical that over my scientific career, we'll have a much better treatment for Parkinson's based on using these cells to understand the biology of those cells. I think that's true about the human body as a whole, is that in some cases, transplantation will work. But for the most cases, you don't want to do that in the first place. You want to make it so you don't have to do the transplant.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

You think we might learn to prevent these diseases?

James Thomson: Yeah. And for tissues that we didn't have access to before, this gives us that new access.

To what extent can you control what an embryonic stem cell turns into? Can it be directed?

James Thomson: Over the last ten years, people have gotten fairly good at that. You can't make everything, but you can make a wide variety of specific cell types now pretty reliably.

How?

James Thomson: There have been a lot of developments of biologists trying to figure out how that happens normally. You can somewhat parasitize that bulk of knowledge from all these other model organisms, whether it's mice or zebra fish or whatever, and a lot of that transfers. Not all of it, but a great deal of it does. So for neural differentiation, people today can already make dopaminergic neurons, can already make motor neurons -- which is what gets killed in Lou Gehrig's Disease -- reliably, in very large numbers. There's other tissues that are harder, but I think over even the next decade, we'll be able to make essentially all the clinically relevant cells in the human body, in essentially whatever quantities you want. But I also think over the next decade there'll be very few successful transplantations and therapies based on these cells.

Do you mean it will take longer?

James Thomson: Yeah, I think so.

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