Michael West
Co-Founder of Geron and current President and CEO of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Worcester, Mass.
The Immortal Cell: One Scientist's Quest to Solve the Mystery of Human Aging
Human beings have always hungered for immortality. But even in myths, those who find the secrets of eternal life often have to pay a high price. Michael West, CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, has spent most of his career as a biotechnologist seeking ways to make mammalian cells live forever. His successes put him at the center of political, moral, and religious firestorms. In The Immortal Cell, West offers not only a chronology of the emerging science of immortality, but a personal journal of his own path from strict creationist to ardent scientist seeking to shape human evolution. It was West and his cohorts who announced in 2001 that by inserting a person's own DNA into an unfertilized egg cell from a woman of reproductive age, they could create embryonic stem cells--cells that might be able to repair any number of problems for the DNA donor, including burns, cancer, degenerative disorders, and even normal aging. Accused of "playing God," West became one of the central figures in the debates on human cloning and was compared to Osama bin Laden by one histrionic news agent. In The Immortal Cell, West describes both the research and the furor that followed. Though the biology is a little tough for general readers, West does a fine job of using diagrams and step-by-step descriptions to explain his processes of cell culture and manipulation. The debate over therapeutic cloning of human cells is far from over, and readers seeking to better understand the debate will find West's book an unapologetic, one-sided argument in favor of human stem cell research. --Therese Littleton
In a Feb 2000 interview, ABC News correspondent Deborah Amos asks Mike West about the prospect of immortalty:
DEBORAH AMOS: Let’s talk about another one of these remarkable technologies and that’s human embryonic stem cells. Why is that important in the notion of immortality?
MICHAEL WEST: Well, besides the problem that all of our cells in our body are aging and growing old and are mortal, we have an additional problem that we have to face with an aging population, and that’s that some of our cells and tissues just wear out. You know, we can lose a tooth. We can get a body burn. We can have a heart attack. We lose cells and tissues and, as you know, if we lose heart tissue, it’s lost forever. So, another tool in our new tool box to treat aging and age-related disease is to develop a new technology to make any cell in your body that you lose as a result of aging. And this exciting new technology is called embryonic stem cell technology. These cells can form any cell in the human body, potentially giving us the ability to sort of a spare parts scenario. I can give you new kidney tissue, new liver tissue, whatever you need as a result of aging.
DEBORAH AMOS: Because as it stands now, the human race is immortal. The question is are we immortal individuals?
MICHAEL WEST: That’s right. We are immortal in the sense that we continue to have immortality through our children. The goal of medicine is to try to translate that biology into treating age-related disease and potentially making humans immortal. Whether we’ll be successful in that attempt, of course, remains to be seen. We’re optimistic that we can improve how you and I age, potentially adding not only life to years but years to our life.
The International Association of Biomedical Gerontology
10th Congress
Human therapeutic cloning: opportunities and challenges
by Michael West
Human Embyryonic Stem (ES) cells are unique in two important aspects. First, they are totipotent (capable of differentiating into any somatic cell type). Second, they are immortal germ-line cells and are, therefore, able to make young cells in vitro for therapy in age-related disease. An important problem to be resolved is how tolerance is to be achieved in transplants made from ES-derived cells. We are pursuing two approaches for tolerance: namely, somatic cell nuclear transfer (using both human and nonhuman oocytes) and the generation of a bank of human ES cells that are homozygous in the HLA region. The relative benefits of these alternatives will be discussed as well as data relating to the cellular lifespan of cells produced by these techniques, and their potential utility in age-related disease including heart disease, immunosenescence, and cancer. http://www.gen.cam.a...10/abs/West.htm
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