James Thomson Interview (page: 7 / 8) Father of Stem Cell Research	Print Interview

When you began your work with stem cells, were you aware of what Dr. John Gearhart was doing at this time?

James Thomson: He's a little bit older than me, but he wasn't terribly well-established in his field at the time.

At some point you decided that you needed a degree in veterinary medicine. That was a surprising move. Could you talk about that?

James Thomson: Yeah, that's an odd one that doesn't fit into my current life very well.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. This professor, Fred Meins, one of the reasons he was so influential, he's just a very good storyteller and was very good at relating personal histories of scientists and what they had done with their lives. And he told me about a fellow named Jared Diamond who's written some popular books recently. But back in the '70s he was a biophysics professor, and yet he had this kind of second life where he did field work in Papua New Guinea, and occasionally would be on the front page of The New York Times for describing some new bird species or something. And that just kind of captured my imagination that you could have these two sets of lives. Plus I was already a biophysics major, and I had an interest in endangered species. The veterinary degree was for some of the practical aspects of veterinary medicine and applying reproductive technologies to manage endangered species populations. And I thought that I could combine the basic biology field of doing embryology in these species with some practical aspects. And I pursued both of those for a while, and I went to vet school because of that. And up until the early '90s I was pursuing both. And then the embryonic stem cells kind of took over my life.

You mentioned an interest in endangered species, early in your career. Where do you think that interest came from?

James Thomson: I can't say in particular. It had...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. As an undergraduate, one of the places I went was to Woods Hole, and there was a lecture by a conservation biologist named Paul Ehrlich. He talked about captive breeding efforts in zoos. This was about 1980, I think, something like that. And he first dismissed it as being useless, because you need a certain number of individuals to maintain a genetic population. You can quibble about what that number is, but it's a pretty sizeable number. And if you look at the large vertebrates in the world, and you filled up the zoos with that number, you wouldn't cover very many species. I was sitting in the audience, having been just a physics biology person, and not knowing anything practical I thought that environmental people could actually freeze embryos and freeze semen. I didn't know much about that. And that very night, I went back to the house I was living at, and Walter Cronkite was doing an interview at the San Diego Zoo. And there was a woman named Barbara Durrant, with a rat in her hands who had come from a frozen embryo. It was like, "Oh, I was right! You can do that." And it was within the next couple days that I decided that having a veterinary degree would be useful to do that. And ultimately, at the end of vet school, I spent some time at the San Diego Zoo with that particular person. So that's where it dated from. It was this idea that I was interested in field work and also wanted to do some basic science in the lab and trying to bring them together in some way.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

Were there particular species that you were interested in working with?

James Thomson: Yeah. It took a while, but after vet school and graduating and finishing my Ph.D., I went to the Oregon Primate Center, because at the time, they had the best access to normal primate embryos. I was interested in using primate embryos as a better model for human development. Mice are the standard model, but they're different in a lot of ways. Oregon had species from Sulawesi, the central part of Indonesia, and I got some money to go to Indonesia to attempt to dart the remnant population of males to collect semen, so there'd be a large leftover population.

Did you say "dart the animals?"

James Thomson: Yes, to anesthetize them. I was trying to get the money to do that. My post-doc was ending, and I had written this grant, and NIH told me that I came in second for whatever grants they got, and they only funded one. So I moved to Wisconsin at that point.

In addition to your veterinary degree, you have another doctorate as well, don't you?

James Thomson: Yes, a veterinary degree and a Ph.D., both from Penn, in a combined program. The Ph.D. is in molecular biology. It was structured just like the combined M.D. and Ph.D. programs, so I got both.

What did you set about doing when you developed your own lab at the University of Wisconsin?

James Thomson: When I worked at Oregon, I was interested in using primates as a model for human development, but primate embryos are very difficult to get, very expensive. The cost back then was like $2,000 an embryo. So you couldn't do 100. It was just physically impossible. So even though there were experiments I wanted to do, I was starved for embryonic material.

Who were you buying the primate embryos from for $2,000?

James Thomson: We were part of the Primate Center, and they're just costs associated with the monkeys. Ultimately the federal government was paying for it. Wisconsin also has a primate center. At the time there were only seven in the United States. So I came to Wisconsin both to do a pathology residency -- that was kind of a practical, "had to pay the mortgage somehow" kind of decision -- and to pursue a post-doctoral fellowship, specifically to derive embryonic stem cells for primates. These embryonic stem cells would provide a much more accurate model for human development than the mouse. That was the goal.

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