Stem Cell Expert Jerry Yang Dies After Battle With Cancer
By WILLIAM HATHAWAY | Special to the Courant
8:15 AM EST, February 6, 2009
Xiangzhong "Jerry'' Yang, who escaped the poverty of rural China to become 
one of the top cloning scientists in the world, died late Thursday after a 
long battle with cancer, according to his wife.

He was 49.

The University of Connecticut scientist died before accomplishing one of his 
dreams - the cloning of a human embryo for potentially-life saving stem 
cells.

But while recent advancements have minimized the need for embryonic cloning, 
Yang provided critical insights into the mysterious mechanisms of the 
technique that put UConn squarely on the frontier of science while laying 
the groundwork for cooperative research efforts between scientists in the 
United States and his native China.

A tireless advocate for human embryonic stem cell research, Yang's cloning 
work catapulted UConn into national prominence in a controversial but 
dazzling new technology. Even people who had moral objections to his efforts 
to clone a human embryo were inspired by his life story and work.

Yang was " a brilliant, relentlessly industrious scientist committed 
passionately to innovative biomedical discoveries,'' said Dr. Peter Deckers, 
former head of the UConn Health Center and a Catholic active in church 
affairs.

"It is very tragic that a serious illness, one which his seminal discoveries 
could have helped treat, took him from us at the height of his productivity 
and genius.''

Humble Origins

The year after he was born, Yang nearly starved to death in a village called 
Dongcun, about 300 miles south of Beijing. So emaciated was the infant 
during the famine years of 1959 and 1960 that a visiting aunt was surprised 
to see him alive.

During his formative years he was an avid student, but in his early teens 
his educational career appeared to be over. Local Communist Party officials 
selected his older brother to become the first from his village to attend 
college and Yang believed that the party would never award the same honor to 
two members of the same family. So Yang resigned himself to tending village 
pigs.

However, after the party reinstated the national college entrance exam, Yang 
took the test and was among the 1 percent of applicants who were accepted to 
college.

Yang was placed in the prestigious Beijing Agricultural University, where 
his high test scores earned him a coveted opportunity to pursue a graduate 
education in the United States.

Breakthroughs

As an animal embryologist at Cornell University, Yang learned the basics of 
cloning.

Most scientists at the time did not believe it was possible to create a new 
animal by fusing DNA from adult cells into an egg with its own genetic 
material removed. The birth of Dolly the sheep in Scotland in 1996, however, 
proved that it was possible to create a genetic duplicate by process 
scientists call somatic cell nuclear transfer.

Yang had taken a position at the University of Connecticut that year and 
immediately seized upon the news, preparing to dive into a new field that 
drew the ire of religous leaders, bioethicists and many politicians.

It was also about this time that doctors first discovered the tumors in his 
salivary gland that would eventually kill him.

In the summer of 1999, Yang put UConn on the world's scientific map when 
Amy, the first cloned farm animal in the United States, was born in a barn 
in Storrs. Yang and colleagues including his wife, fellow scientist Cindy 
Tian, began to study all aspects of cloning.

For instance, Yang proved that early reports that clones would age 
prematurely were false. The claim was based on observation that Dolly's 
telomeres, the caps on the end of her chromosomes which wear down with age, 
were shorter than in other sheep.

However, Yang showed that the telomeres in his cloned cows were as long, or 
longer, than in cows conceived in more common ways. Also, the FDA relied 
heavily on Yang's work when it found meat dairy products from cloned farm 
animals were safe to eat and drink.

"Jerry was one of the greatest scientists and cloning pioneers of our 
time,'' said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief science officer at Advanced Cell 
Technology of Worcester, a biotech company which has pursued creating stem 
cells through cloning. "He was a really great man who struggled to his last 
hours to better the world and to advance the scientific cause. We will all 
miss him dearly."

Curing Disease

Yang always knew that the ultimate application of cloning would be to create 
human embryonic stem cells. He believed that one day it would be possible to 
take a skin cell from say, a victim of Parkinson's, and through cloning 
create healing embryonic stem cells that would not be rejected by the 
patient's own immune system.

His quest to become the first scientist to create such "patient-specific 
stem cells'' was chronicled in an eight-part series that ran in the Courant 
in 2007. Those ambitions were derailed by his illness and in 2006 by a lack 
of state funding for an ambitious plan to explore cloning and other methods 
to create such "super'' human embryonic stem cells.

Many of the ideas contained in the proposal, including cloning, have shown 
promise and one even promises to make human cloning irrelevant. Last year, 
Japanese scientists showed that they could create embryonic like cells from 
a human skin cell, making it unnecessary to finding human eggs for cloning 
and subsequently destroying the embryo for its cells.

As a young professor at Cornell University and throughout his tenure at 
UConn Yang worked tirelessly to create collaborations between Chinese and 
American scientists. China, which had dismantled its higher education system 
during Yang's youth, needed infusion of American scientists to become a 
first class scientific power, Yang believed.

The United States, meanwhile, could continue to benefit from infusion of 
bright young scientific talent to supplement work being done in American 
labs.

He build on his China Bridges program that promoted exchanges of professors 
and proposed the creation of international scientific collaboration to study 
cloning and other potential ways to create embryonic stem cells for use 
patients. Several of his students returned to China and became instrumental 
in jump-starting that country's nascent stem cell research efforts.

Yang solicited and received approval from top international scientists to 
participate in the collaboration and the proposal is under active 
consideration by the Chinese government, he said before his death.

"His quick silver mind was constantly moving from one topic to another in a 
way that left people breathless.,'' said Ian Hart, a longtime friend. "At 
any one time his mind could range from the next scientific advance, to 
thoughts of creating another building or research institute, hosting a 
scientific meeting, encouraging young Chinese students to study in the 
United States, or the possibility of opening up a separate research 
institution in China."

Rayilyn Brown
Director AZNPF
Arizona Chapter National Parkinson Foundation
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