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.”
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