James Thomson, the American scientist who first isolated human embryonic stem cells, asserts that it is unlikely that they will be useful for transplantation and curing dread diseases directly. Instead, he told the magazine Forbes, their ultimate use will be for drug testing. He recently co-founded a company, Cellular Dynamics International, whose focus is testing experimental drugs for heart side effects. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

♦  “I do think there will be some niches where transplantation is important, but I think people are grossly underestimating how hard it is going to be for most diseases.”

♦ “And I know that a lot of people are going to work on transplantation, I hope it's successful, but I'd actually be fairly shocked if 10 or 20 years from now we didn't have such a good understanding of the biology of that disease that we didn't have to do transplantation.”

♦  “The hype that was created [by stem cell science] is largely a part of that political debate. Both sides played a little bit loose with the truth, I think, at various times. One side would say one thing, the other side would feel obligated to counter it, and if you say rational, reasonable things, it doesn't get the message across. So it's kind of understandable, but the consequence of that is that people are ill-prepared for how difficult it's going to be to get transplantation therapies based on these cells. And that that's to be expected, because it's so brand-new.” ~ Forbes, May 28