Resurrection Science by M. R. O'Connor

Author:M. R. O'Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

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Metaphysical Rhinos

Ceratotherium simum cottoni

In early 2008, stem cell researcher Jeanne Loring decided to take her staff on a field trip to the San Diego Zoo. Loring had recently been recruited by the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and the visit was an opportunity to thank her staff for moving their laboratory. It was an unusual field trip for this group of scientists. For decades, Scripps has been on the leading edge of medical research, developing and testing treatments for leukemia, HIV/AIDS, and multiple sclerosis. Loring’s research is in the field of regenerative medicine—how to engineer human cells to treat and cure neurological disease. Regarded as a pioneer, she was one of the first people to master the production of human embryonic stem cells in a laboratory. She is a passionate evangelist for her field, involved in landmark legislation and patents. Loring describes herself as a scientist who likes big questions, and stem cells, she says, let you ask them. The subtext of the trip to San Diego was one of these big questions: Could they employ stem cell technology for the purpose of wildlife conservation?

Loring knew about the Frozen Zoo, the collection of tissue samples from more than 1,000 species run by conservation geneticist Oliver Ryder. There had even been some talk between Loring and Ryder before about how embryonic stem cells might be used in conservation biology. “The trouble was, the technology didn’t exist,” said Loring. “It was just talk.” Harvesting stem cells from the embryos of endangered animals was both logistically and ethically challenging.

In 2006, however, Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka published his method for reprogramming any mature living cell into a stem cell, creating what is called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs. (The achievement would garner Yamanaka the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2012.) In this immature state, these new cells are capable of developing into any type of cell in the body, including eggs or sperm. When Yamanaka’s method was published, Loring immediately adopted it in her laboratory. It was no longer necessary to get stem cells from embryos; they could essentially grow as many as they wanted from a single skin biopsy. The method was so foolproof that she was soon assigning the job of reprogramming cells into iPSCs to her undergraduate interns. “This, in my field, was like getting a huge present,” she said.

The applications for research were seemingly limitless. iPSCs made it possible to generate living mice from mouse skin cells, an achievement that could pave the way for growing replacement organs from a patient’s own cells. And because the iPSC lines could be specific to patients, their bodies wouldn’t reject them. Loring’s lab was soon initiating projects to reprogram the cells of people with Parkinson’s into iPSCs, turn these into brain cells, and reintroduce them to the brain for treatment. The possibilities “were the kind of thing you dream about as a scientist,” said Loring. “It’s like magic.”

After feeding giraffes and watching the animals on their trip to

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