Skating on Thin Ice --- The Bottled-Up Stem Cell Community Deceived by Dictating Interest and High Impact of Unquestionable Prestige

Today, with the world second largest economy and a new generation emerging from the 90^th, China’s culture revolution has been left behind in a bottled-up history. No one, not even those who were born into it, could make sense of culture revolution any more, could make sense of the insanity, brutality, and mass destruction committed by those who were so young so innocent. Only those who once lived in the bottle and had their life dictated by the unquestionable will and sugar-coated political interest of a single high power beyond their control could believe what had really happened was totally unavoidable. For the rest, reading culture revolution is like reading the consequence of irrationality. In my teenage years, not even through my aunt’s hilarious imitation, I could make sense that my young, handsome, intelligent, and kind parents, uncles and aunts, would leave their infant kids alone at home in the dark, voluntarily go to do their totally ridiculous duty dancing on the streets just to show their devotion to a dying old man. Until they finally got their own common sense back, just in time to catch the last nearby train flee out of the exploded conflict zone, leaving their toddlers behind to survive a war-torn city.

The recent wave of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) in the stem cell community is just as insane as the culture revolution, making no sense at all to anyone who has little bit of common sense, to anyone who has little bit of scientific integrity. Besides the Nobel committee’s golden framed words that need Karolinska Institute’s intelligence to understand, besides the perplexed news persons’ copied words that do not need Karolinska Institute’s intelligence to tell that it sounded very much like a scam, what has Yamanaka really accomplished? Yamanaka put not just one, not two, not three, but 4 oncogenes into skin cells, not even the skin of humans but lab rats, rationally or scientifically, he would not get anything coming out of it but cancer cells. If Yamanaka told the public in lay language what he really did, probably any ordinarily people would only think he was just some mad scientist. However, it was told through the high impact peer-reviewed prestigious scientific journal Cell, it was told in sugar-coated political interest by highly-trusted big names as the “safe” and “ethical” alternate for human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), it was copied by every major news agencies throughout the world as “the biggest breakthrough of stem cell research” without hearing a single critique or even precaution, like a man-made earthquake with the magnitude that could even shake the more than 100 years of unquestionable prestige of Nobel Assembly. Although Yamanaka’s Bernie Madoff scam in the stem cell community does not make any sense scientifically, it does make sense monetarily if simply check how much taxpayer money has gone into the epicenter of Yamanaka iPS cells from NIH and CIRM since.   

In 1989, James was in London, stayed in Margaret Thatcher’s old flat. He visited Berlin Wall without any speculation that someday it would come down. He had to memorize his passport number in case that the Berlin Wall might really prevent him from coming back to the free world. Then, a few months later, it was gone, forever. Danny was in Beijing, turned on the TV in his hotel room and saw CNN to his surprise. He thought Chinese people could actually watch CNN, how wonderful. I was in the same city, and like all the Chinese people only 100 feet away from his Westerner-only hotel, did not even know the existence of CNN and could only watch one single state-controlled news broadcast – China Central News. Nearly 20 years later, when I sit in front of my parents’ TV bigger than the one we had, that was still all I could watch. If talking enforced high impact, the Central News broadcast occupies the prime time, copying the same exact words with never-changed sugar-coated tone through every channel, every household, every neighborhood, and every dinner table of an entire country that I have never missed even a bit. A KFC and a large shopping mall erupted right next to my old elementary school that was still very much unchanged. I went into KFC to taste the chicken that looked and tasted just like a KFC, then went into the shopping mall to spend my parents’ money and brought a few pairs of pure gold earrings, then went by my old elementary school that looked just like what I remembered, having this incredible feeling that I was going through a time machine. Hong Kong, from where I flew in, was only 2 hours away. Their TV satellites could pick up the signals of some Hong Kong channels. However, the interfering signals to those channels were so bad, few minutes staying on those snowy channels would only make the Central News sound unbelievably wonderful. 

Although Berlin Wall had come down, without transparency, the peer-review system can be easily broken by the dictating interest and high impact of unquestionable prestige, and Berlin Wall can always be rebuilt by a privileged few to implement their own will and fence away fair competition and everything else that a democratic free country has stood for.

This piece is written in memory of Margaret Thatcher, the only woman and only scientist who had become a great politician of the world and had sailed through a stormy era in our time.