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the Stem Cell Page time and ignorance are the enemies |
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Keeping Missouri’s eyes on the stem cell prize |
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June 10, 2006
Last month I was fortunate to attend the Global Health Symposium hosted at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City. It was my first visit to Stowers. Well, actually it was my third visit to the campus. I had visited twice when it was the old site of Menorah Medical Center. I was a young kid back then and had broken my arm when visiting relatives. But since then Menorah moved and the property was purchased and completely rebuilt into the state of the art research facility that stands today.
I was scheduled to have lunch with Bill Neaves, Stowers’ CEO. Making his acquaintance proved to be a genuine pleasure. Bill is as enjoyable as he is enlightening. He’s an unpretentious, affable fellow who answered my continual flow of questions with both ease and understandability, sprinkled with bits of his friendly and delightful sense of humor.
Just getting lunch was both a culinary and technological extravaganza. The cafeteria consists of several stations featuring specialty chefs who prepare outstanding delights, fresh and right before your eyes. The salad bar is not your typical stainless bathtub of ice upon which bowls of lettuce and trimmings await your picking. No, at Stowers everything is first class. Everything. Even the salad bar. It’s a slab of polished granite bored out to accommodate tubes which circulate thermostatically controlled, chilled water to keep the granite surface icy cold. (I was later told how two cranes were required in order to construct it.)
So I meandered from station to station, watching the chefs prepare meals for others as I decided what to select. At one station I overheard a conversation in French. I stopped and listened for moment, placed my order at that station, and listened some more. The chatter came from two researchers and after a few more moments I asked where they were from. The first said, “France,” (no surprise), and the second said, “Germany.”
I continued my query, asking why they came all the way to Kansas City to perform their research. They looked at me, stunned. Then they looked at each other and smiled, then back at me. “Look around you,” they said in unison. Those three words spoke volumes. The environment at Stowers has few, if any, equals in the world.
“And how would you describe the environment here?” I asked.
Without hesitation, the Frenchman said, “It’s perfect.”
“Perfect?” I raised my eyebrow as I asked. “Perfect would indicate there’s no way to improve. Isn’t there something that would improve Stowers?”
The German fellow answered, “More people.”
This clearly distills the conundrum facing Missouri. Of all the assets deployed in the fight against disease, none is more valuable than people. In Missouri, we have a number of facilities. In addition to Stowers, there’s Washington University and the University of Missouri. We have vital financial support. Stowers and Washington University are both private institutions. The University of Missouri is using the NIH stem cell lines approved for federal funding. This is one reason that the Missouri Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, unlike its predecessor in California, requests no state funding. The immediate problem is people rather than money.
Neaves explained that Stowers’ current facilities in Kansas City were designed to readily facilitate 500 people and could even accommodate 600, the only limitation being parking. Yet to date the entire staff, from CEO to maintenance, totals only 370 due to a freeze until the Stem Cell Initiative is settled by voters.
Does this mean that the growth of Stowers’ influence in research has been totally frozen? Not exactly. Jim and Virginia Stowers established a separate entity to fund research elsewhere. A project has already been funded in Massachusetts, where a Harvard research team received several million dollars that might otherwise have been invested in Kansas City, if not for the unsettled stem cell issue in Missouri. While this doesn’t represent a ‘brain drain’ (no researchers left Missouri in this case), it does present a parallel that underscores squandered opportunity, which would undoubtedly follow a failure of the Missouri Stem Cell Initiative.
The current under-capacity at Stowers of some 130 to 230 people at its current facility must be coupled to the fact that construction of a second campus is suspended pending the outcome of the initiative. This campus could bring the total head count toward the realm of 1000 jobs. A thousand jobs that could be home grown in Missouri, instead of potentially forfeited. Word has leaked that a failed Missouri initiative could mean Stowers might invest their next $300 million in California. And all this represents the effect at a single Missouri institution.
Anti-science sentiment does not remain a secret in the biotech industry. Such sentiment also affects those engaged in research other than stem cells. It affects growth in pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and other non-stem cell related medical research as well. This is why we hear concern emanating from both agricultural giant Monsanto and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center among others.
As states like Missouri make decisions about their futures regarding stem cell research, they would be wise to remember that this is one industry in which America can either garner a long term leadership role or once again be relegated to outsourcing.
If we shrink our market share based upon minority religious ideology, the rest of the world will still continue to improve their scientific environments and accelerate their investments. Singapore, Israel, China and the United Kingdom have long been consumers of American medical technologies, but now stand to vault themselves into positions of becoming America’s providers. In the process, the next American generations could become dependent upon foreign-sourced medical therapies, treatments and cures in much the same fashion as we are today dependent upon foreign oil.
America has the assets to ensure medical self sufficiency. We just need the will and a dose of common sense to rapidly deploy those assets. More importantly, harnessing the full power of American medical research can hasten the day when numerous diseases and injuries might become distant notations in history books, much like polio morphed from a feared killer to mere memory in my generation.
And that’s the real prize.
- Jeff Eisen
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