# 306 Saturday, March 17, 2007 -  THE GREAT "STEM CELL MEETING"
Some things you do because they must be done: boring repetitive jobs, making
the bed, all right,
 uh-huh, just get it done.  Others you do for sheer joy.

Writing about "The Stem Cell Meeting", the glorious two-day conference,
March 12-13, put on by Burrill and
Company, is definitely in the latter category. The only thing bad about it
was I couldn't attend the second day,
as Roman, Gloria and I are all heading down to the Roman Reed Spinal Cord
Injury Research Act meetings,
followed by the hugely important Independent Citizens Oversight Committee
meeting-- $80 million going to
embryonic stem cell research projects?

First, the atmosphere was class, class, class-beautiful building (UCSF on
Owens Street, San Francisco)
excellent food, outstanding speakers, more take-home materials than you
could read in a month of Sundays-
and cheerful people everywhere.  The first day began in one of those
(usually) awkward ice-breaker meetings where people with badges drink
coffee and try to make new acquaintances.
But this time, everybody seemed to know everybody else-and if not-hi,
friend, glad to meet you!  We were united by the energy of stem cell
possibilities.

A lovely young lady named Nathalie Kayadjanian was just starting off in the
new arena-hi, friend,
glad to meet you-she was all excited about the hope of using stem cells to
understand and do battle with the
scourge of ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease-

Hey, how are you? I turned around and there was silver-haired Steve Burrill,
the venture capitalist behind
the event. Naturally I had to offer him my free advice. There was a problem
about the lunch.

I was speaking at one of the lunch "table meetings" (everyone chose a table
at which they ate and listened
to/chatted with an expert) and the problem was, there were had so many
interesting people.

A 90 minute lunch. what if we split up the time, so everyone could hear more
than one person? I mean,
one of the tables was hosted by Paul Berg. A chance to  sit with Paul Berg,
the DNA expert and Nobel
Prize winner?  I had a strong temptation to just give out my handouts to the
folks at the table I was
supposed to speak at, excuse myself, and go listen to Dr. Berg!

Steve said they had consider that, breaking up the lunch into three courses
for that very reason, but the
logistics of a couple thousand people making multiple table changes would be
difficult. Then he was off shaking hands with the next old or new friend.

The room was jammed with energy, people joined by a common conviction, that
stem cells would do
something important.  Snippets of fascinating conversations overheard-"the
Mayo study, embryonic stem cells for heart tissue repair."
. "Fourteen countries taking the lead." "We have a moral obligation.one
hundred stem cell companies."

Excuse me, somebody said, tapping me my shoulder, is that Bob Klein? I
turned,   looked where she was pointing,
 and no, it wasn't. It would have been surprising if it had been-he was not
speaking until the second day, and  the
usual pattern for Bob is that he arrives at a meeting about 45 seconds
before it is ready to start and is still working
on his speech on the walk to the podium.

Tuesday he would be speaking as part of a panel with David Gollaher,
President of California Healthcare Institute
(genuinely witty speaker, try and hear one of his speeches if you ever get
the chance)-- and I had to miss them both,
drat! Tuesday (today) I fly down to Southern California, as soon as I finish
this writeup.

Steve Burrill opened the show with brief remarks. in Congress 17 out of 19
stem cell candidates had won.
everybody has a father, mother, sister, brother, loved one with a chronic
disease .in Holland, work is being done
to repair the optic nerve. Then he introduced the first "speaker", a special
video interview.

Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, interviewed by Howard
Steinberg, founder of Dlife, the
effective diabetes/stem cell lobbying group. She had some beautiful points
to make.  "We are all just a phone call or a diagnosis away" (from chronic
illness or incurable injury) she said.  "The American people are way ahead
of Washington on this issues (stem cell research).
"We have to be respectful of those who disagree with us about embryonic stem
cell research," she said at one
point, "This is not religion against science, as some of the opposition
likes to say it is-- This is God's gift to us
to solve these terrible problems."

http://www.dlife.com/dLife/do/ShowContent/resources/diabetes_advocacy/nancy_pelosi_interview.html?sc_ext_cid=100162&sc_chid=1009

Christopher Scott, author and Stanford stem cell expert, introduced the
first in-the-flesh speaker, saying:
"A large, dun-colored, long-eyelashed sheep that changed the world-will you
welcome please, the man whose name will be forever linked with Dolly-Ian
Wilmut."

Any conference that starts off with Ian Wilmut automatically has my
attention to begin with-even if he was just so filled with pride about his
country (Scotland may well change its name to Stemcell-land) that he talked
wayyyyy too much about the UK's new Regenerative center-at first, I thought,
hey, bless the man, we did not want to buy the place, just hear about the
work being done there!  But it was important-like an entire college focused
on stem cell research-and the billion dollar Scottish Centre for
Regenerative Medicine will be a vital link to the future.

And then he got to the science-- and I almost wished we could go back to the
buildings!  Bio-informatics.microscopy.screening.cell replacement.basic
research.self-renewal.pluripotency.hESC derivatives.niches..gene
expression..toxicology.ALS. nuclear transfer. Everything reminded him of
something else. It was a forest of scientific terminology.  I understood
it-occasionally.

But my favorite part was when we in the audience had a chance to ask
questions- naturally I was first to the microphone!  I wanted to know, if
Professor Wilmut was addressing a group of intelligent teenagers, who were
considering a career in science, what would he say about the gift of Dolly?

He said first something technical about how, instead of cellular structure
being regarded as fixed and unchangeable, we could now take the cells back
to an earlier stage and make changes that could ease suffering.  And then he
seemed to get a fix on the imaginary teenagers."I would tell them, "Be
ambitious, be bold-the doors are opening to great change."

Zach Hall did a lovely brief overview of the progress of the California
Institute for Regenerative Medicine, reminding us of the incredible
accomplishments the Independent Citizens Oversight Committee and the CIRM
staff.  The announcer asked him, what was he going to think about when he
sat on his front porch in Wyoming, and he said the expected things about
being 70 and he and his wife wanted to do more personal projects now,
instead of endless meetings-but he seemed sad-and so did we.

A panel of experts spoke on the business of stem cells, pointing out that in
the past year, despite the hassles inflicted on us by Washington, even so
stem cell stocks have out-paced the market. These were not lobbyists-these
were the leaders of companies. Steve Burrill, CEO of Burill and Co., Johann
Hyllner, COO of Cellartis, Alan Lewis, President of Novocell, and William
Caldwell, chairman of Advanced Cell Technology-the decision-makers.

A particular joy was when William Caldwell spoke of the urgency to get
products to market.  Dr. Mahendra Rao of Invitrogen spoke on stem cell
advances in the Pacific Rim, reminding us that the rest
of the world is not exactly waiting on America to make up its mind-China,
India, Singapore and other
friends of research are moving ahead.  Stephen Minger, director of the Stem
Cell Biology laboratory in King's College, London, spoke some heavy-duty
science, but all the while I kept thinking-here he is, an American, born and
raised and educated in the good old
US of A-but he had to go to England to do the research he wanted to do.

One shocker from him was a man who had a chopstick in his brain. In a
restaurant argument, someone literally
stabbed a chopstick through the man's eye and into his brain.  He was still
alive, the chopstick was removed-and the scientist thought, hm--- let's take
a look at the braincells still on the chopstick! Knowledge comes in strange
ways.

They showed a clip of some English "humorists" mocking the science. I guess
they were funny, but it irritated me.
Like one of the English projects is to try and avoid the need for donated
eggs from women by using emptied rabbit
eggs-just the "shell"-and of course the big laugh was the impending threat
of "rabbit men".

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