James Thomson, the first person to isolate and cultivate human stem cells, back in 1998
What I'm reading: An article in MIT Technology Review titled, "After 25 years of hype, embryonic stem cells are still waiting for their moment." The gist of the article is summed up in the headline. But it's not all gloom and disappointment - there's genuine excitement and some real breakthroughs also.
A bit of background: Stem cells were first isolated in 1998. Because stem cells have the power to develop into any tissue in the body, there was a huge amount of excitement at this development. Scientists, journalists, and health crusaders were promising imminent cures to previously incurable conditions — diabetes, blindness, multiple sclerosis.
But progress turned out to be much more difficult than first thought, for a few reasons:
Coaxing stem cells into the right adult cells is very tricky
It also takes a long time, almost as long as does in the womb, which means that research is slow
It's also very expensive — one gram of the right growth factor can cost as much as $750,000
Even when stem cells are developed and implanted, there are still problems, such as the fact that the stem-cell-derived cells die off faster than they should
The upshot: 25 years on, there is still not a single stem-cell therapy on the market. Instead, we just have a proliferation of unregulated and often shady stem cell clinics, selling dreams rather than real cures. And many early stem cell advocates, who had hoped stem cells would cure their own conditions, are now dead.
And yet there's hope: the past four years have seen 70 stem cell trials on patients — more than triple the earlier pace. I reported on one particularly encouraging recent trial for Parkinson’s disease. The MIT Review article also talks about a promising stem cell treatment for epilepsy.
But maybe we are looking at it all wrong. From the article: "Kriegstein [a professor at UCSF and a biotech CEO and founder] told me he doesn’t think 25 years is a long time for this type of therapy to emerge. Instead, he counters, it’s 'actually kind of fast.'"
Who can really argue with that? We're at the cusp of perhaps the most momentous scientific transformation of the human experience — eradicating death, suffering, and disease. 25 years is really just a blip in the long human history of trying to achieve that.
But of course, 25 years can make all the difference in an individual human life. And the fact that we are so close to a breakthrough makes promises all the more tantalizing, and disappointments all the more painful. In case you want a bigger-picture view of the current situation, the MIT Technology Review article is worth a read.