Word: pedersen
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...Dean Knowles is thinking about expanding the size of the faculty, he is very concerned--and Dean Pedersen and I share the concern--that there be some tangible benefit for undergraduate education," Wolcowitz said...
That's not quite what's happening in Roger Pedersen's lab at the University of California in San Francisco--at least not yet. But he has managed to turn a group of carefully tended progenitor cells into a patch of thriving, beating cardiac muscle. "It's amazing," Pedersen says, "when you put unspecialized cells away, come back after the weekend and there's a clump of heartlike cells beating before your eyes in a dish...
...Someday, scientists hope to use cells like these to cure diabetes, Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis, as well as to reverse congestive heart failure and heal spinal-cord injuries. But there are some aspects of this story that are brave new world-ish. Known scientifically as stem cells, Pedersen's marvelously pliable cells are derived from seven-day-old human embryos, which are destroyed in the process. Although not all stem cells are produced this way, embryonic stem cells seem for now to have the greatest potential for medical miracles...
...Pedersen--and the handful of other scientists working with human embryonic stem cells--uses embryos left over from fertility attempts that would otherwise be thrown away. Still, treating human embryos like so many tissue factories seems straight out of Huxley. It certainly doesn't sit well with antiabortion activists--or, in many cases, with lawmakers. In 1996 Congress banned human-embryo research by federally supported scientists, forcing researchers like Pedersen to seek private funding (most of which has been provided by Geron, a Menlo Park, Calif., biotech company...
...Pedersen says she is excited to work with departments other than History and History and Literature, where she has made her home for nearly 20 years...