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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.

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Posted by Monya Baker on December 04, 2007
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Arrival in Cairns, Australia

The people in the airport keep calling me “love”. Telltale cardboard tubes show who on the airport shuttle bus is headed to the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Cairns, Australia. I start chatting with a young blonde professor from Sweden who is turning embryonic stem cells into neurons, and she laughs as she tells me she sometimes hates human cells. Mice ES can generate neurons in maybe 10 days, but human ones take 20 or even 50.
Just before the bus heads off, another researcher boards. He was born in Iran but he moved to Sweden in his youth, and the two scientists talk across me in Scandanavian syllables. He's a former surgeon happens to be working in lower back pain caused by tissue degeneration. He’s been trying to implant mouse cells into damaged rabbit spines, but he’s frustrated because bone growth in rabbits mean the cells won’t take hold. He’s soon to move to a new lab where he can try the same thing in pigs; he’s excited to get started. “Pigs,” he keeps saying, referring to the innards of the spinal cord. “They look just humans.”

Posted by Monya Baker on June 17, 2007
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