Alumni

Excerpt from the Penn Stater Magazine: 'How not to play God'

When you're a stem-cell researcher -- even a mild-mannered one like Kent Vrana -- you don't get to pick your battles. The battles come to you.

By Jason Fagone '01 A&A/Com

Looking at stem cells in a microscope is vaguely disappointing, like meeting a celebrity in person: There's no way for the reality to live up to the hype. I'm looking at a bunch of stem cells right now, and in the strictest visual sense, wow, are they not sexy. I'm in a lab room on the seventh floor of the Hershey Medical Center. The room is chilly, thanks to the air circulators that keep the environment stable, and also quite small, about wide enough for two people; we're exceeding that limit now, thanks to me, a soft-spoken Turkish researcher named Ugur Salli, and Kent Vrana, a brain biochemist and stem-cell expert. Salli and Vrana are here to explain what I'm seeing in the microscope. I see three little balls of tapioca. Each ball is a colony of 20 to 50 stem cells. Vrana -- the Elliot S. Vesell professor and chair of pharmacology at Penn State -- must be used to people being underwhelmed by his stem cells, because as soon as we walked in here, he leaned against the wall and said, cheerily, "This is the anticlimactic room." Really, how could anyone familiar with the last three years of stem-cell debates not expect drama, explosions? These are stem cells? The bio-goo so powerful it could have healed, according to some scientists, the cracked spinal column of Superman himself, Christopher Reeve? So controversial it made a political activist of Teen Wolf (Michael J. Fox, a Parkinson's patient), transformed scientists into godless baby-killers in the eyes of the evangelical right (Vrana receives the occasional e-mail warning him that "I'm on the express elevator to hell"), and got President Bush quoting Brave New World in a public speech? These dull-looking things are stem cells?

For the full story, Penn State Alumni Association members should check the March/April issue of The Penn Stater magazine. To become a member or receive more information on the Penn State Alumni Association, visit http://www.alumni.psu.edu online.

Last Updated March 19, 2009

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