James Thomson Interview (page: 6 / 8) Father of Stem Cell Research	Print Interview

We've heard a number of medical scientists talk about the future of medicine being preventive and predictive. Do you see it that way?

James Thomson: Yeah. It may or may not be true in this case, but say Parkinson's, for example. We don't know why those neurons die, but if we understand precisely why they die, you could probably look at the population and prevent whatever that was. If it's not clearly genetic, it's something else. There's probably something environmental and you have to understand what that is. Then you potentially don't let it happen to that person in the first place.

How do you go about that?

James Thomson: It's not clear, but if you have the neurons that are killed, the dopaminergic neurons, you can look at all the factors that keep them alive and healthy, and come up with ideas of what makes them unhealthy. Precisely how that's going to happen, I don't know. I'm not a neurobiologist. But simply having the normal cells at hand gives you tremendous opportunity to understand what goes wrong when they're killed. Not having that material, you can't do anything.

Will you be able to recognize a Parkinsonian cell?

James Thomson: You can recognize the normal common part of the cell that's killed in Parkinson's disease, and try to understand what keeps it healthy and happy, to come up with ideas which can go wrong to make it not healthy and happy.

How do you manage to have such patience in a field that has such thrilling implications for all of us?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. James Thomson: So biology, there's simply a rhythm of the material you work on. And you can't change it. You can't change it by having a lot of hands doing things in parallel, which is happening right now in this field. But these cells divide about once every day. So if you want to make one cell go to a lot of cells, it takes some time, right? So I think you just get used to what you can do with your system, what you can't, and just live with it. And pushing harder doesn't always work.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Do you come from a family of scientists?

James Thomson: No, my father is a CPA, and my mother worked at a university as an assistant. So there was nobody in my extended family who was a scientist.

When did you first feel an interest in this field?

James Thomson: I think every little kid's a scientist. And for some kids it goes away, and some kids in doesn't. In my case, it just never went away.

You grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. What was your life like there?

James Thomson: I guess it was a pretty normal childhood, normal school system. I liked school. I liked science and math as a little kid and just kept pursuing it.

Were you into sports at all?

James Thomson: I didn't like team sports. I liked individual sports. I like tennis a lot. I was a pretty good runner, too.

What about books? Do you remember books that you particularly enjoyed growing up?

James Thomson: I read a lot. I can't say I can think of one off the top of my head that inspired me.

What fields were you reading in?

James Thomson: Just general novels and things.

When did you decide to go into the field of science professionally?

James Thomson: That's a hard one, because it was kind of a continuity. By the time I hit college, I certainly planned to go into science, although I didn't know precisely where I was going. Little by little I found the things I liked in college and pursued them. But I could have pursued computer programming or mathematics or something else at that point in my life.

You got a biophysics degree first, from the University of Illinois. At that point, were you already interested in embryonic development?

James Thomson: Yes. My talent was in math and physics so I studied mostly math and physics. Then I had a biology class with a very influential mentor in my life, and I decided to go into biology. He's the one that introduced me to developmental biology, and I just thought it was really neat.

Who was that?

James Thomson: His name is Frederick Meins, and he was a teacher at Illinois just for a couple years. Then he moved to Switzerland to a place called the Friedrich Miescher Institute, and he was there until he retired.

What was he doing there?

James Thomson: He came out of Rockefeller University, and he studied something called crown gall. This is a cell similar to embryonic stem cells that is from a plant. It can be in an undifferentiated blob, and if you add the right chemicals it would form leaves or roots. It's basically the plant world's equivalent to embryonic stem cells.

Did you immediately see that this had implications for human beings?

James Thomson: I wouldn't say that. I just turned on to biology because I thought it was neat, and he introduced me to some of the literature in mammalian embryology from some basic experiments that I just thought were so amazing I wanted to go into that field.

What did you find exciting about this field?

James Thomson: Well, there's one experiment I liked that he introduced me to.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you could take an embryo that hasn't yet implanted from a mouse, and one's from a black mouse, and take another embryo from a white mouse and you just nudge them together, they form one mouse. And that adult mouse has black and white patches along it. And it basically has potentially four different parents, but it's all one integrated mouse. And I was just fascinated that embryogenesis was so regulative that you could take two individuals, put them together, and get this single individual. And that degree of self-regulation ultimately is what allows embryonic stem cells to be derived. I certainly wasn't thinking about that at the time, but I just really thought that experiment was fascinating and wanted to be in that field.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

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