_Physician and biologist Kenneth Chien talks about why he left California for Boston to do stem cell research, what Boston scientists might learn from their West Coast counterparts, and how developing stem cell therapy can be compared to a football game._
Corie Lok
Early last year, Kenneth Chien, then of the University of California, San Diego, and his team reported in Nature the discovery of progenitor cells (a type of stem cell) in the neonatal hearts of rodents and humans, marking Chien’s move into the controversial area of stem cell research. A few months later, he left California, which has pledged $3 billion for stem cell research, and moved to Massachusetts, which has pledged no state funding and whose governor even vetoed a bill supporting stem cell research (the veto was overruled by the state House and Senate).
Now he is a professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School and leads the Cardiovascular Research Center at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute’s Cardiovascular Stem Cell Biology Program. After almost a year in Boston, Chien tells NNB editor Corie Lok why this is a better place for his work on human embryonic stem cells and how the Boston scientific community can do even better.
NNB: Why did you move to Boston?
KC: One of the major attractions of Boston is the critical mass effort here in stem cell biology in general, and human embryonic stem cell biology in particular. From an outsider’s viewpoint, from a pure scientific stance, I would say that the Harvard and MIT communities combined are probably a minimum of two years ahead of everybody else in the area of human stem cell biology in the U.S.
Now, of course, moving to Boston was counterintuitive at the time because Proposition 71 was passed [the $3 billion stem cell research initiative passed by California voters in 2004]. But I thought that rather than building a new stem cell effort in San Diego or California, one could come here and get started right away.
NNB: But $3 billion is still a lot of money.
KC: I think the three most important ingredients in not just stem cell science, but almost any science, is people, people, and people. You need more than stem cell biology to achieve stem cell therapy. I don’t think it’s really been achieved at all in the cardiovascular system. The clinical trials [implanting bone marrow stem cells and other cell types in the hearts of heart attack patients] have been quite disappointing.
But the wrong approach would be to say that stem cell biology cannot lead to new therapy. I am a believer in its long-term potential.
If one would accept this New England Patriots football analogy, developing stem cell therapy could be viewed as trying to kick a winning field goal in overtime. It’s sudden death. If you kick the field goal, you win. It would be a major achievement. We all hope for that. Like in overtime, time is running out for patients with these severe diseases. So it encourages you to try to give it a shot. The motive is noble.
The problem is that on the basis of the earlier scientific work for cardiovascular repair, we thought we were in field goal range. So we brought Vinatieri and the kicking team on. We’ve made a number of kicks and it looks like the ball is falling short, or going wide left or right.
What this suggests to me is that we need to move the ball down the field first. And to do that, you need different types of people. You don’t just need a kicker. You need a quarterback, wide receivers, running and blocking backs. You’re going to need a talented, interdisciplinary team. There’s a critical mass of expertise in this community to do this today. We have the breadth and the depth here.
NNB: Have you noticed any differences in the research culture between Boston and San Diego?
KC: There are many more scientific and financial resources here. Philanthropy is at a completely different level here.
One thing I’ve also noticed is a very subtle level of complacency. It’s one of the things here that I think is dangerous. There’s a lot of great work that could be done here, should be done here, but isn’t being done here. Proportional to the resources that we have here—financial, institutional, human—there should be a much higher level of risk-taking to do not just logical “next-step” work, but really out-of-the-box, high-risk work. We can afford to take more risks.
There are some things from California that I think would be nice to see here. People in California are hungry. They’re extremely entrepreneurial. But still, with the exception of the weather, I’m quite happy here.
NNB: If you could travel back in time and be a scientist who made a historical, transformative discovery, what would that discovery be?
KC: If you take Jared Diamond’s [the author of Guns, Germs and Steel analysis to be correct, probably one of the big discoveries was gunpowder. And since that was Chinese in origin, I’ll claim that.
NNB: Looking forward, what “holy grail” scientific achievement do you hope will be made in the next 30 years or so?
KC: For my own field, my hope would be that heart transplantation would be a thing of the past.
NNB: How long do you think it will take to achieve this?
KC: Decades.