Shanghai stem cell conference promises more to come
Shanghai crab is a delicacy available for only a short time each year, and the 20-million-strong href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE2D91F3BF937A2575AC0A960948260&sec=travel&spon=&pagewanted=1" > residents of Shanghai devote themselves to its consumption. It was auspicious that the tasty crabs were still available during the first Shanghai International Symposium on Stem Cell Research, attended by around 500 scientists, hundreds of Chinese researchers and close to 100 foreigners. (NOTE: I wrote this on November 10th, but wasn't able to post until today.)
To put that in perspective, the last meeting of International Society for Stem Cell Research, the biggest annual stem cell conference, drew just over 1,900 attendees in June this past year.
China’s government and academies are pouring resources into stem cell research, and Chinese-born researchers trained in the United States are proving a huge asset. Some are returning to China to head up labs in that country; others are remaining in the US but forming collaborations with researchers in China.
The hosts went out of their way to make the foreign guests feel comfortable. The graduate student assigned as my host not only picked me up from the airport, but also met me at 7 am the day my flight left for a quick tour around Shanghai, and stayed with me until I had my boarding pass to go home.
Interestingly, he’s determined to come to the US. Neither Europe nor Australia appeal to him as much. These kinds of attitudes are doubtless good for US science, and they are understandably self-perpetuating, since Chinese-born researchers are more likely to go where they see other Chinese-born researchers thriving.
A common refrain I heard was that the Chinese work presented was of high quality but that the work that was being done in the US (often by Chinese-born scientists) tended to be more interesting.
The chairs of the scientific organizing committee were Ying Jin of the Shanghai Stem Cell Institute at the Shanghai Jiatong University School of Medicine and Xin Wang from the Key Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology both of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences (SIBS) and Lizhao Cheng of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Harvard’s George Daley, president of the ISSCR was very involved. The chair of the local organizing committee was Guo-Tong Xu, part of SIBS and CAS.
The meeting was an experiment of sorts for the International Society of Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), which co-sponsored the regional meeting. The experiment seems to have worked. A letter in the program booklet apologized for any apparent lack of organization, since only 300 attendees were expected and more than 500 had registered. (They accommodated everyone just fine.) Speakers hailed from some dozen countries. I met attendees working in Sweden, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and the UK, and the conference program said that there were attendees from more than 20 countries.
But sometimes I wondered whether the conference was more bilateral than international. A quick glance through the scientific talks shows one from Australia, one from Japan, two from Singapore and none from other Asia-Pacific countries. There were some 25 from the US, and just over 30 from China. Obviously, the Chinese government, which invested heavily in the conference, has no interest in helping other countries develop their stem-cell research. Still, despite political wrangling, I thought there might be more participation from nearby Japan and Australia, both of which have a strong community of stem-cell researchers.
While most of the talks were nuts-and-bolts science, the last panel was a quartet of non-scientific presentations, including one on ethical issues in stem cell research which covered everything from the therapeutic misconceptions in clinical research to ethical oversight of basic research in embryonic stem cells and similar cells that aren’t derived from embryos.
There was some buzz over how to capitalize on China’s friendly attitude towards human embryonic stem cell research. Guo-Tuong Xu of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences described government plans to set up a national stem cell bank over the next 4 to 5 years. However, although, I’ve heard lots of talk about China’s government establishing generously funded centers of regenerative medicine, that project seems to have stalled, at least for now.
China also has an advantage in its ability to do research in non-human primates. Because Alex Zhang from the Beijing Institute of Geriatrics, Xuanwu Hospital presented unpublished work showing that beta-cell progenitors can be vastly expanded and that when autologous cells are injected into a primate model of diabetes, the cells help control glucose levels for several months before effects start to fade. He actually showed videos of the monkeys and was straightforward about the experiments.
There were several basic science talks teasing out how cells differentiate; the mind boggles at how exquisite some of these systems are. (I had a hard time telling what was published previously, however.)
(Full disclosure: since I was taking the place of invited speaker and Nature editor Natalie DeWitt, the conference is covering most of my expenses.)