Stem Cell Meeting on the Mesa — The Hijacked Stem Cell Research

In 2008, a few months after Beijing Olympics, I was at Singapore for a keystone stem cell meeting. One speaker at the meeting jokingly opened his talk by saying that he was the only speaker invited to the meeting who was not an organizer, greeted by a loud laugh from the audience for the utter truth about today’s meetings. I was not completely out of guilt because my real motivation coming to the meeting was en route to mount city Chongqing to pay my over-due visit to my folks. Chongqing sits on the top of Yangzi River guarding the heavenly roads to China’s far west and the flourishing veins stretching through the rich plateau to Northeast. Yang Song, my brother-in-law I was hoping to see, was not at the Chongqing airport to pick me up, my very old folks were. Inside the taxi, my mom broke the grave news to me that Yong Song was found to have later stage brain tumor and about to have brain surgery, which made me immediately think about Ted Kennedy, who had brain tumor, and Evan Snyder, who was just granted a stem cell patent for brain tumor, before I realized the seriousness of the situation. My mom, an old-fashioned math professor who would not even accept computer science as a science, begun to recite to me some stem cell wonders she read from newspapers and wanted to know if the American scientists could do the magic. Yang Song had been my shuttle from the beginning. In the early days, he came to pick me up in his tiny three-wheel bug, rattled through the treacherous dirt road along Jiaoling river, almost rocked my stomach out and every time I swore I would never come back again. The last time I saw him, he was in a real four-wheel car, his own, drove me through the newly-paved wide freeway like we owned it. If it was not for those alien high-rise buildings up the cliff that looked scarily dangerous and the misty Jiaoling river deep-down the cliff that looked so familiarly lovingly, in a brief moment in my mind, I would have been able to overcome the distance between the two homes.

In the old days, scientific meeting is open for communications, questions, and discussions of most recent, important, and exciting advances of scientific research. Sadly, such purpose and openness are lost in today’s meetings. With the presence of editors from top scientific journals and representatives of funding agencies, invitation to speak at a meeting is like a golden ticket to front page publication and multi-million grants. Such privileges usually are reserved for the meeting organizers and a small group of their kin. Stem cell meeting on the mesa has been such close door privilege meetings in extreme. At one mesa meeting, not one stem cell was shown by any of the speakers, but $6M CIRM grant to the out-of-state speaker and a cluster of Nature publications soon afterwards made regular scientists hardly believe there was no connection. Although I wrote to Sanford consortium president to express our interest in collaboration & partnership, we did not receive any announcement about the meeting or invitation to their partners held by CIRM. I knew our abstract about human embryonic stem cell research would have a difficult time to get in since Jennifer Braswell, the sidekick of Larry Goldstein at UCSD, was in charge, but still surprised how quickly they responded to me that they were full, but not full for themselves of any posters. Did we hear such familiar responses too often? CIRM also used pre-application to turn down State’s human embryonic stem cell research & therapy for the patients they cared about by saying that they had too many not stem cell applications.

My family is very supportive, has been saving all the local newspaper clippings about stem cells so I would not miss any. I reluctantly took a look of the golden photo of Sanford consortium, noticed that there were a few impostor’s faces next to it. Larry Goldstein is famous for sending emails all over UCSD to blowup others’ faculty job, I could hardly believe he is OK of impostors of his kin now. Meeting was heavily about adult cell reprogramming and cloning, iPS cell keynote in the morning and cloning keynote in the afternoon, with speakers of meeting organizers and CIRM disease teams between. With 2 former mentors sitting in front of me and the table-banging mentor behind, I tried to ask the dumbest questions to keep myself safe this time. Geron would be the significant presence of human embryonic stem cell therapy partner at the meeting, but because of its surprising exit right before the meeting, the partner meeting held by CIRM vice president Ellen Feigal was heavily on adult cell, reprogramming, and gene therapy, and was purposely only for disease teams that already had a slot for CIRM funding. The swift impact of the meeting could soon be shown in the next ICOC meeting, where everyone, including NIH, had turned into Japanese, the iPS cells.
Although it remains questionable whether colaboratory will be collaborative and Sanford will be as its intent to house open stem cell research, Sanford consortium for regenerative medicine is sitting on the premier property of La Jolla, overlooking the magnificent sunset of Pacific Ocean and giving the unearthly impact of “Life is a Miracle.”

This piece is written in memory of Yang Song.