Joseph Altman, currently professor emeritus at Purdue University, in Lafayette, Indiana. Altman carried out seminal studies on the production of new brain cells in the 1960s. Prior to Altman’s work, nearly all scientists believed that a person was born with all of the brain cells it would ever have. Altman demonstrated that he observed new neurons (brain cells) being created in the hippocampus portion of the brain and then migrating to other parts of the brain. Altman’s studies were largely ignored for at least a decade by many scientists, and for even longer by the majority of the scientific community.
Elizabeth Blackburn, Morris Herzstein professor of biology and physiology in the department of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California–San Francisco. She is a widely respected authority in the field of stem cell research. Her field of expertise is telomeres, regions located at the ends of chromosomes that control the process of replication. She discovered an enzyme known as telomerase that controls this process. Blackburn served on the President’s Bioethics Advisory Commission from 2002 to 2004 before being asked to resign by President George W. Bush. The official reason offered for this action was that Blackburn had been unable to attend meetings of the commission. Blackburn and others, however, said that their views on embryonic stem cell research were regarded as too liberal for the administration. She has been critical of the operation and activities of the commission.
Rod Blagojevich, governor of Illinois. Blagojevich signed an executive order on July 12, 2005, committing $10 million in state funds over the coming year for research on stem cells. Blagojevish pointed out that the decision by the federal government not to fund embryonic stem cell research made it imperative for individual states to take over part of that funding responsibility. Prior to his election as governor, Blagojevich served as member of the state assembly from 1992 to 1996 and in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1996 to 2002.
Ariff Bongso, research professor in the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at the faculty of medicine of the National University of Singapore. He was the first person to isolate human embryonic stem cells from a five-day-old human embryo in 1994. Bongso was trained as a veterinarian in his native Sri Lanka but later became interested in the young science of in vitro fertilization (IVF), where he made a number of research breakthroughs while working in Singapore, to which he had moved in the early 1980s. He was a member of the IVF team that produced the first successful “test-tube baby” born in Asia in 1983. In addition to his isolation of the first human embryonic stem cells, Bongso has developed methods for maintaining human embryonic stem cells in a regenerating state outside the human body for essentially limitless periods of time, allowing the establishment of new stem cell lines.
Robert Briggs, former head of the embryology department at the Institute for Cancer Research and professor of zoology at Indiana University. With colleague Thomas J. King, he carried out some of the earliest research on somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus of a cell from one organism is transplanted into an egg from which the nucleus has been removed of a second organism.
Ralph Brinster, currently Richard King Mellon Professor of Reproductive Physiology at the University of Pennsylvania’s college of veterinary medicine. He was responsible for some of the earliest research on the fate of nonembryonic stem cells transplanted into mouse blastocysts. He transplanted cells taken from teratocarcinomas and the bone marrow of mice into the blastocysts of host mice and found that those blastocysts grew into normal adult mice with the characteristics of both the host mouse blastocysts and the mice from which the transplanted cells had been taken.
Sam Brownback, Republican senator from Kansas. He has been one of the strongest opponents of stem cell research that results in the destruction of embryos or other early forms of life in the U.S. Congress. He has introduced bills to prevent cloning for either reproductive or therapeutic purposes in every session of Congress in recent years. Two such bills were S. 245 and S. 658, the Human Cloning Prohibition acts of 2003 and 2005, respectively.
George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States. Bush announced his administration’s policy on stem cell research in an address to the nation on August 9, 2001. That policy allowed the use of certain existing stem cell lines for research on human embryonic stem cells, but prohibited federal funding of research in which new embryos would be created solely for the purpose of experimentation. Since his 2001 address, the president has maintained his opposition to any type of stem cell research in which embryos are created and then destroyed for any purpose whatsoever.
Lisa Sowle Cahill, J. Donald Monan professor of theology at Boston College. She has written extensively on ethical issues related to stem cell research, cloning, abortion, and other bioethical issues. Some of her most important work has involved the commercialization of new biotechnological procedures, such as those concerned with the production and use of human embryos for stem cell research.
Daniel Callahan, cofounder and director of the International Program at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institution in upstate New York. He is a highly respected observer of and commentator on the development of stem cell research. He has been opposed to embryonic stem cell research because, as he has explained, he has “always felt a nagging uneasiness at trying to rationalize killing something for which I claim to have profound respect [a human embryo].” He also spoke out in opposition to California’s Proposition 71, establishing the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine to be funded at a level of $3 billion over a 10-year period. “Whether anything comes of this research,” he said, “it is sure to line the pockets of many scientists and biotechnology companies in the process.”
Mike Castle, Republican representative from the state of Delaware. Castle was cosponsor of House bill H.R. 810 in the 109th Congress. The bill authorized the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “conduct and support research that utilizes human embryonic stem cells.” The bill passed the House, was never acted on by the Senate. Castle was previously deputy attorney general, state legislator, lieutenant governor, and, for two terms, governor of Delaware. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1993.
William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd president of the United States. Clinton was confronted with growing interest in and conflict about the use of embryonic stem cells in research throughout his presidency. He inherited a policy that banned the use of all federal funds for such research from his predecessor, President George H. W. Bush, but gradually liberalized that policy in order to permit the use of at least certain types of embryonic stem cells under certain conditions. By the time he left office in 2001, Clinton had set in motion a plan to permit the funding of such research with tax dollars, a policy that was reversed shortly after his successor, George W. Bush, took office in January 2001.
Diana DeGette, Democratic representative from the state of Colorado. She was cosponsor of House bill H.R. 810 in the 109th Congress, a bill authorizing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to conduct and support research using human embryonic stem cells. She served two terms in the Colorado legislature before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1997.
Jay Dickey, formerly a congressman from the 4th congressional district of Arkansas. He was author of an amendment to the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services in 1996, an amendment that prohibits the allocation or expenditure of any federal funds for research that involves the destruction of a human embryo or embryos. That amendment has generally become known as the Dickey amendment and has been reintroduced and adopted every year since it was first passed in 1996. Dickey was first elected to Congress in 1992, where he served for four terms until his defeat in 2000.
Richard M. Doerflinger, deputy director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He is a prominent spokesperson in opposition to the use of embryos and materials obtained from embryos in research of any kind whatsoever. He is also adjunct fellow in bioethics and public policy at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Boston. Doerflinger has written extensively for the Hastings Center Report, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, the Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine, the Dusquene Law Review, and a number of Catholic magazines and journals. He has also testified before the U.S. Congress, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and the National Institutes of Health on issues related to the use of human embryos in research.
Hans Driesch, German biologist and philosopher, carried out a series of classic experiments in the early 1890s in which he divided two- and fourcell sea urchin embryos and found that each of the individual cells produced was able to develop into a complete, normal adult sea urchin. In order to explain his results, Driesch later developed a theory of “entelechy” that attributed an organism’s growth and development to some sort of supernatural “unifying non-material mind-like something.” The effect observed by Driesch was later found to result from the proliferation and differentiation of embryonic stem cells.
Robert Edwards, professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, England. With colleague Barry Bavister, he performed the first successful ex utero fertilization of a human egg in 1968. The experiment was one of the seminal steps in developing the procedure of in vitro fertilization, which has since been responsible for the birth of tens of thousands of children to otherwise infertile couples.
Sir Martin Evans, professor of mammalian genetics and director of the school of biosciences at Cardiff University, in Wales. Along with colleague Matthew Kaufman, he was the first person to successfully isolate embryonic stem cells from a mouse. He and Kaufman then developed a process by which those stem cells could be kept alive in a proliferative, nondifferentiating state for many generations, producing the first embryonic stem cell lines available for research. Because of this research, Evans has sometimes been called “the chief architect of stem cell research.” In addition to his work on stem cells, Evans has long been interested in the development of modern gene therapy, in which altered genes are introduced into organisms suffering from some sort of genetic disorder. During the 1990s, his research team performed the first successful experiments in curing a mouse with cystic fibrosis by means of gene therapy.
John D. Gearhart, C. Michael Armstrong professor of medicine and professor of gynecology and obstetrics, physiology, and comparative medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Hygiene. Gearhart published an historic paper in stem cell research in 1998 when he reported on the derivation of human embryonic stem cells from primordial germ cells. Gearhart also serves as director of the Division of Development Genetics, director of Research for Gynecology and Obstetrics, and director of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In addition to his work on stem cells, Gearhart has published papers in the fields of genetics, development, and genetic counseling.
Howard Green, currently George Higginson Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard University. He invented a method for growing cells in vitro on irradiated mouse fibroblast cells. Green’s murine fibroblast mat was later to become the standard feeder layer on which stem cells are maintained in a proliferative, nondifferentiating state over periods of many months or years. In later research, Green found ways to embed epidermal stem cells in fibroblast mats for use as synthetic skin for patients who had been severely burned, earning him the accolade from some as Father of Skin Culture.
Jim Greenwood, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. He represented the 8th congressional district of Pennsylvania from 1993 to 2004. During his tenure in office, Greenwood was a strong supporter of embryonic stem cell research and introduced a number of bills authorizing the funding of such research with federal tax monies. As an example, he cosponsored (with representative Peter Deutsch) H.R. 2608 in the 107th Congress, a bill that would have permitted the production and use of human embryos for research and therapeutic purposes, but not for human reproduction. Greenwood’s bills consistently lost out to more restrictive legislation banning all forms of embryonic research.
John B. Gurdon, research scientist and group leader in the Institute of Cancer and Developmental Biology at Cambridge University. He was the first person to successfully clone an animal. During the 1960s, Gurdon carried out a number of experiments that destroyed the nucleus of the eggs of frogs, and transplanted into those eggs the nuclei from tadpoles. Some small number of those eggs eventually developed into new tadpoles, exact copies (clones) of the organisms from which the nuclei had originally been taken.
Gottlieb Haberlandt, Austrian botanist. A pioneer in modern studies of plant tissue culture, he hypothesized in 1902 that it should be possible to grow a complete mature plant beginning with no more than a single cell taken from that plant. He said that this experiment should be possible because each cell in a plant possesses a “totipotency” that allows it to develop into any one of the types of cells of which the mature plant consists and into which it can grow.
John Hearn, Australian reproductive and developmental biologist. He was formerly director of the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center, located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was responsible for recruiting James Thomson, the first person to isolate human embryonic stem cells in 1998, and to provide him and other researchers with unusually fine laboratory conditions in which to conduct their studies.
Konrad Hochedlinger, a postdoctoral researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Boston. He demonstrated in 2002 that a mouse can be cloned from mature, highly differentiated cells taken from an adult animal. Later in the same year, Hochedlinger and his advisorcollaborator Rudolf Jaenisch used embryonic stem cells to cure a mouse of an immune disorder, the first time in which a therapeutic application of stem cell research had been conclusively illustrated.
Robert Hooke, English physicist. He was the first person to explicitly recognize the existence of tiny pocketlike units within living organisms. He gave these units the name cell after the Latin word cella meaning “small room.”
Rudolf Jaenisch, one of the founding members of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, in Boston. He was joint author with one of his postdoctoral students, Konrad Hochedlinger, of an important paper in 2002 describing the cloning of mice using adult stem cells, the first time such a procedure had been conclusively shown to work. Jaenisch and Hochedlinger also authored a 2002 paper that described the use of stem cells to cure mice of an immune disorder, the first occasion on which the therapeutic value of embryonic stem cell transplantation had been conclusively demonstrated.
Leon R. Kass, chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, on leave from his positions as Hertog Fellow in Social Thought at the American Enterprise Institute and Addie Clark Harding Professor in Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry at Harvard University in 1967 and was a researcher in that field briefly before turning his attention to ethical and philosophical issues raised by advances in medical research and the biosciences. Since 1970, he has taught and written extensively on a variety of issues in the field of bioethics.
Thomas J. King, professor of embryology at Georgetown University, division director at the National Cancer Institute, director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and deputy director of the Lombardi Cancer Research Center at Georgetown. King collaborated with Robert Briggs in the early 1950s to develop the procedure now known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), in which the nuclei are removed from cells of one organism and transplanted into cells that have had their nuclei removed of a second organism. When done successfully, the host cell grows and develops normally, as Briggs and King discovered in their classic studies of the leopard frog (Rana pipiens).
Karen Lebacqz, professor emerita of theological ethics at the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, California. Lebacqz is coeditor, with Suzanne Holland and Laurie Zoloth, of The Human Embryonic Stem Cell Debate, a book of readings on the scientific, legal, and ethical issues related to stem cell research. She has also written, spoken, and taught extensively on other areas of bioethics, including bioethics of the Human Genome Project and ethical theory.
Gail Martin, professor of anatomy at the University of California at San Francisco. She is codiscoverer with Martin Evans and Matthew Kaufman of murine (mouse) embryonic stem cells in 1981. She is often credited with having invented the terminology now in common use for these cells. Her current research focuses on the roles played by specific molecules in the early differentiation of murine embryonic stem cells.
Alexander A. Maximow, a Russian military officer who first proposed the notion that all kinds of blood cells—white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets—are all produced within bone marrow from a single precursor cell, which he called a Stammzelle. Some scholars believe that the modern term stem cell can be traced to Maximow’s use of the similar term Stammzelle. Maximow’s ideas were largely rejected or ignored throughout his lifetime and received experimental justification only with the work of Ernest McCulloch and James Edgar Till in the 1960s.
Richard McCormick, a moral theologian who taught at Georgetown University. He wrote extensively about the moral status of the human embryo, with special attention to its potential use in human embryonic stem cell research. After considerable research and deliberation, McCormick came to the conclusion, contrary to church doctrine, that the very early embryo was not truly a human and that, therefore, an argument could be made for its use in experimentation, provided the end results of such experimentation justified that use.
Ernest McCulloch, Canadian medical researcher. He carried out pioneering work on hematopoietic stem cells in the 1960s with James Edgar Till and Andrew Becker that provided experimental evidence for the existence of such cells, produced methods for the culturing of stem cells, and found methods for counting the number of hematopoietic cells in bone marrow and other body organs.
Douglas Melton, Thomas Dudley Cabot professor of the natural sciences at Harvard University and codirector of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. His research focuses on the development of the pancreas, in general, and, more specifically, on the role played by stem cells in that process. One product of his research has been the development of 17 new stem cell lines, produced with private funding. Melton has testified before the U.S. Congress in support of federal funding for stem cell research and is active in a number of organizations promoting the conduct and funding of stem cell research.
Eva Mezey, Hungarian-born medical researcher, current head of the Adult Stem Cell Research Section at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. In the late 1990s, Mezey discovered that some of the hematopoietic cells transplanted into mice migrated to the brain and transdifferentiated into neurons. Her discoveries were, at first, largely disbelieved, although many similar cases of transdifferentiation have since been discovered.
Beatrice Mintz, senior member of the basic science division of Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. She carried out an elegant series of experiments in the early 1970s in which stem cells taken from a teratoma were transplanted into a normal blastocyst. The cells were incorporated into the blastocyst and became part of the normal embryo into which it grew. Mintz is perhaps best known for her work resulting in the production of the first transgenic mammals, organisms produced when the genes from one mouse have been transplanted into the body of a second mouse, resulting in an animal with two different genetic maps.
Thomas Okarma, current president and chief executive officer of Geron Corporation. After serving as a faculty member at the Stanford University school of medicine, Okarma joined the corporate world, where he was a founder, vice president for research, and president and chief executive officer of Applied Immune Sciences, Inc., and senior vice president at Rhone-Poulenc Rorer before joining Geron in 1997. At Geron, Okarma was vice president of cell therapies and vice president of research and development before being appointed to his present posts at the company. Geron funded Dr. James Thomson’s research on stem cells and has been awarded patents for nine stem cell lines developed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Deborah Ortiz, state senator for California’s 6th state senate district. She has been an outspoken advocate for all forms of stem cell research and was the author of senate bill 253 in the 2002 legislative session, affirming the state’s support of human embryonic stem cell research. She was also active in the campaign for Proposition 71 in the November 2004 election, an initiative that created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, to be funded with $3 billion of taxpayer monies over a 10- year period.
Gordon Barry Pierce, former professor of pathology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. He was codiscoverer with medical student Lewis Kleinsmith that teratomas are caused by the proliferation of individual stem cells known as embryonal cancer (EC) cells. Born in Canada, Pierce spent virtually all of his professional career in the United States. He is best known for his studies of the character of teratomas and the role of EC cells in their development.
Harriet Rabb, current vice president and general counsel to the Rockefeller University. She wrote a critical memorandum in 1995 on the legality of federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research while she was general counsel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Rabb ruled that, while federal money could not be used for the production of human embryos for research, it could be used for research on such embryos produced with private funds.
Nancy Reagan, wife and widow of former president Ronald Reagan. She became an outspoken advocate of all forms of stem cell research during the later stages of her husband’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease. At one point, she announced that “we have already waited too long” to find out how stem cells might be useful in treating diseases like the one from which her husband was suffering. During the 2005 congressional debate over federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, she encouraged both President George W. Bush and members of congress to act to approve federal funding for such research.
Ron Reagan, Jr., son of former president Ronald Reagan. He is a strong advocate for stem cell research, arguing that it has the potential for curing a broad range of debilitating diseases currently untreatable by other methods. He spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004, arguing that, although some people opposed embryonic stem cell research because they believed that embryos are live human beings, “[i]t does not follow that the theology of a few should be allowed to forestall the health and well-being of the many.”
Christopher Reeve, an actor with credits in stage, screen, and television productions. Reeve will perhaps always be best known for his portrayal of Superman in the film of that name and its sequels. In 1995, he was thrown by the horse he was riding in an equestrian competition and paralyzed as a result of an injury to his spine. During the next decade, he became very active in efforts to promote research for the treatment and cure of spinal cord injuries, including stem cell research. He died on October 10, 2004, although his work in the support of medical research is being carried on by the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation.
Matthias Jakob Schleiden, 19th-century German botanist. He was the first to hypothesize that cells are the structural units of which all plants are made. His suggestion, along with a similar theory for the structure of animals by Theodor Schwann, constitute the basis of modern cell theory. At one point, Schwann makes the prescient observation that “any given cell may be separated from the plant, and then grown alone.”
Theodor Schwann, 19th-century German physiologist. He theorized that all living organisms are made of cells and that these cells grew out of preexisting cells. Schwann also discovered the enzyme pepsin, hypothesized that fermentation was a biological process, and identified yeast cells as plantlike organisms.
Patrick Steptoe, British obstetrician and gynecologist. With colleague Robert Edwards, he performed the first successful in vitro fertilization of a human egg that resulted in the birth of a normal child, so-called “test tube baby” Louise Brown, in 1978.
Leroy Stevens, long-time researcher at the Jackson Laboratory, in Bar Harbor, Maine. He has been called “the unsung hero of stem cell research” because of his early discovery of pluripotent cells in mice. Stevens’s research on pluripotent cells, a term he invented, began shortly after he joined the Jackson Laboratory in 1952 when he discovered the presence of teratomas, tumors consisting of many different kinds of cells, in the scrotums of a particular line of experimental mice. He spent the rest of his life studying these cells, retiring from the Jackson Laboratory in 1989.
Frederick Campion Steward (“Camp” Steward), former director of the laboratory of cell physiology, growth, and development at Cornell University. He became famous for a series of experiments he and his colleagues conducted in the 1950s during which they were able to regenerate a complete carrot plant beginning with a single carrot cell cultured in coconut milk. The experiment demonstrated the possibility of dedifferentiating a mature cell into a more primitive form that was then able to reproduce and form all of the mature cells needed to form a complete plant.
Tommy Thompson, 19th secretary of Health and Human Services. He was previously a member of the Wisconsin state assembly and governor of Wisconsin for four terms, from 1987 to 2001. He served in the George W. Bush administration from 2001 until his resignation in 2005. Prior to his appointment as secretary of Health and Human Services and during his first six months in office, he was an ardent supporter of stem cell research and encouraged Congress to support funding of SCR. After President Bush’s speech on August 9, 2001, outlining his opposition to most forms of stem cell research, however, Thompson changed his views and mounted a vigorous support of the president’s program.
James Thomson, professor of anatomy at the University of Wisconsin Medical School–Madison. He was leader of a research team that announced the first successful culturing of human embryonic stem cells in a paper published in the journal Science in 1998. Thomson received his doctoral degree in veterinary medicine from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 and his Ph.D. in molecular biology from Penn in 1988. His current research studies factors that promote the self-renewal of stem cells, the maintenance of pluripotency, and the pathways leading to the differentiation to specific cell types.
James Edgar Till, Toronto-born specialist in radiation biology. With Ernest McCulloch and Andrew Becker, he cooperated to produce groundbreaking research on hematopoietic cells in the 1960s. Along with McCullouch, he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame for his work in this area in 2004.
Harold Varmus, current president and chief executive officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, was director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999, a period during which much fundamental research on stem cells was being conducted. During that period and since, he was and has been an outspoken supporter of all types of stem cell research, suggesting on one occasion that “[i]t is not too unrealistic to say that this research has the potential to revolutionize the practice of medicine and improve the quality and length of life.” Varmus was awarded a share of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for his studies of the cellular origins of genes that are responsible for certain types of cancer.
Catherine Verfaillie, a Belgian-born authority on hematology and oncology, and director of the University of Minnesota’s Stem Cell Institute. Her current research interests include the nature, development, and treatment of Fanconi and sickle cell anemia; the processes by which human hematopoietic stem cells develop, proliferate, and differentiate; and the properties of adult stem cells, in general. Verfaillie has written extensively on the scientific characteristics of stem cells and their potential therapeutic value, has appeared as an expert witness before the President’s Council on Bioethics, and is coeditor of Handbook of Stem Cells (2005).
Irving Weissman, Karel and Avice Beekhuis professor of cancer biology and professor of pathology and developmental biology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. He was the first person to isolate any type of stem cell. In 1988, he demonstrated the existence of hematopoietic stem cells in mice and, four years later, repeated his success with human hematopoietic stem cells. In 2000, a research team led by Weissman became the first to find and isolate stem cells in the human nervous system. Weissman has founded two companies to promote research and development on stem cells, SyStemix and StemCells, Inc., and, in 2002, was named director of Stanford’s newly created Stanford Institute for Cancer/ Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. He has also served as chair of the Panel on Scientific and Medical Aspects of Human Cloning of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dave Weldon, Republican representative from the 15th congressional district of Florida. He has been an outspoken opponent of embryonic stem cell research. During the 109th Congress, he cosponsored with Representative Bart Stupak (D-Minn.) the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2005 (H.R. 1357) to prohibit the cloning of human embryos for any purposes whatsoever, either for purposes of reproduction or to obtain embryos for scientific research.
Michael D. West, current chairman of the board, president, and chief executive officer of Advanced Cell Technologies in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has been a major force in providing the funding necessary to conduct stem cell research in the United States without the expenditure of public tax dollars. In 1990, he founded the biotechnology firm Geron Corporation in 1990, where he served as director and senior executive officer until 1998. He then cofounded another biotechnology company, Origen Therapeutics, a company focused on the development of transgenic technologies. In 1999, he was a member of a group that took controlling interest in Advanced Cell Technologies, where he has remained ever since. In the early 1990s, West obtained funding from private sources for the research at James Thomson’s and John Gearhart’s laboratories that led to the first isolation of human embryonic and fetal stem cells.
Roger F. Wicker, U.S. representative from the 1st congressional district of Mississippi since 1995. He was cosponsor of the Dickey Amendment in 1996 that prohibited the Department of Health and Human Services from funding any type of research involving the production, purchase, or commerce in human embryos.
Ian Wilmut, professor and head of the department of gene expression and development at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland. He was leader of the research team that cloned the first mammal, a sheep, named Dolly, in 1996. Dolly was euthanized in 2003 because of lung problems believed related to her atypical method of conception and birth.
Laurie Zoloth, professor of medical ethics and humanities, and of religion, at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She has written and spoken extensively on the ethical issues related to embryonic and adult stem cell research. Her current research interests involve ethical problems that have arisen as a result of advances in medical technology and research in genetics. She is a member of the National Advisory Council of the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA), NASA’s Planetary Protection Advisory Committee, and the executive committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. She also serves as chair of the Bioethics Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
