It is a great company, trying to great things.  And has done some, from the standard model.  But when Geron announced that they were closing their embryonic stem cell efforts, it was like a lead weight falling on all the hopes of the embryonic promoters.  Geron had persevered where others had failed and got the FDA to approve an embryonic stem cell clinical trial.  As many know, they stopped that trial and closed down the whole division.  Startling to many (especially shareholders).  But the inevitable outcome for efforts that are born of a defiance to the facts of basic biology.  The facts are that the human body, given the right conditions, will rebuild itself.  

For the bulk of modern medical thinking, the adult body was "terminally differentiated," meaning it was a finished product and unrenewable, except for some few exceptions, the liver and bone marrow.  That's one reason bone marrow transplants have been done for 40+ years.  But what was a bone marrow transplant, but a kind of stem cell transplant, with blood stem cells.  And yet, our collective unconscious in medicine remained derived from what we can only think of as a long-standing view of the 'body' as a complete entity, a finished product that then slowly wore out.  As folks have found, bodies do regenerate, although inefficiently.  Think of how an injured brain 'rewires' itself, essentially 'regrowing' the kinds of connections that lead to function.  A transplanted female heart, in a male body, will become partly "male" with male heart cells (cardiomyoctes).  Where did they come from?  And a woman who gives birth to a boy, expecially if she has a sick heart, will find that some of her heart muscle is colonized with her son's stem cells.  The latter has greater relevance about what it is to be an "individual," not just about stem cells.

So, as the real stem cell business, using your own stem cells to cure disease, begins to gain momentum, we may find many of the unspoken presumptions of an old way of understanding bodies will fall away in the face of facts.  But do not look for it to go gladly.  We still hold ourselves above and outside of biology and the natural world.  But underneath it all, we are dynamic, renewable organisms, despite our unwillingness to do that.  Someday, maybe, we will stop fighting nature, supporting the myth of domination.  And then, maybe, we can learn the beauty of living within that nature, and within ourselves.

I was part of a meeting with a handful of noted cardiologist researchers discussing the development of a clinical trial using a medical technology to reduce pain from and incidence of angina.  We have already run a pilot trial that should very good outcomes for treated patients.  The strongest opinions of the group were that the endpoints of the study should be on angina frequency and exercise capacity, as that is the only thing FDA accepts as valid outcomes.  Lots of discussion about how debilitating the condition can be and how there are not good alternatives for folks failing medical management (love that, 'patients failing.'  In my world, medicine is failing the patients, not the inverse - yes, inverse).  Within our technology company, we have always been enamored of imaging, so originally divined to get some kind of imaging for the trials, but that was deemed both unnecessary and potentially pointless, as the images are highly variable, even among symptomatic patients.  A late-arriving cardiologist/researcher, quite young, gave an animated, even slightly angry, defense of images.  Of course, she is an imaging specialist, so did have a dog in the fight, so to speak.  Her argument met the harshest of academic fates, it was simply ignored and the meeting adjourned shortly thereafter.  While we got organized for dinner, she spoke to me under her breath, while looking sharply at the others, "There has to be an objective measure of change, you can't just rely on patient reports, they are just subjective."  I did not push her on this, as I might otherwise (like invoke Roshaman), simply because I wasn't sure she wouldn't get really upset, even as we went to dinner.  I thought about the two 'camps' in this clinical debate.  The older, seasoned clinician researchers were happy to rely on patient reports, because, after all, that is what constitutes the disease itself, is the patient complaint.  The
young researcher seeking objectivity as some kind of 'truth,'
can do so as long as she doesn't examine things too closely.
She might end up making the argument that patients should
be treated on the basis of 'objective' data, independent of
complaints.  That is the basis of lots of therapies, and lots
of unnecessary treatment and side-effects.  But more
interesting is this notion of 'objectivity,' in that even in
mathematics we find, at the core, a subjectivity that cannot
be resolved.  For example, the law of trichotomy lets me
state that any number is odd or even or zero.  Seems pretty
straight-forward.  So is Pi even or odd, as it is clearly not zero? Guess we have to take it on faith that it is one or the other.