Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse…

I usually hope to provide evidence to the Friends of the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine of how our research and translation of our discoveries offers hope for understanding the fascinating biology of all types of stem cells, for perceiving how the discoveries can be interpreted in the light of human diseases —the experiments of nature—and how those interpretations might eventually lead to diagnoses and/or therapies to improve the human conditions. But for this issue I must leave you to read the stories within this document. 

We are in the confluence of disasters: Race- and gender-related acts of inhumanity, a plague that erases many of the lives we would hope to save, an unnatural climate-related set of wildfires and hurricanes and tornadoes in overheated atmosphere and drought, and the emergence around the globe of authoritarian anti-democratic dictatorships—established or wannabe’s— that are certainly of biblical proportions. I am unsure whether this use of the bible is religious or a document of history.  I certainly don’t know if it relates more to Job, or Noah and the Ark, or the plagues that came day-by-day. But sadly, these appear more to be man-made than divine in origin to me . 

The greater bay area, from the fires near home to the destroyed homes, vineyards, and farms of the wine country, affects our students, employees, faculty, staff, and supporters. All of these events compromise our ability to pay attention to and to nurture the biomedical research and therapy enterprise that is Stanford Medicine, of which we are an important part. We are trying to respond appropriately to each, in many ways exploring first in our immediate home, the stem cell institute, and next in the greater institution of Stanford University. In a way, each of our local responses are akin to the ‘laboratories of democracy; that allowed experimentation of how to define, respond, and eventually to find ways to address and solve problems in new ways that can gain larger currency only when they succeed.

 Several such “laboratories” are exploring how to eliminate systemic racism, to figure out how to slow COVID-19, to find homes for those dispossessed by the wildfires, and to bring back those who wish to use science—including stem cell science—for understanding and treating the diseases we promised you we would keep as our focus. Those that are coming back to carry out stem cell science while under siege are our heroes. 

While we do so, we cannot ignore the toll these events are taking on our people. Personal angst and anxiety and fear for the future overlays our efforts to keep the daily events at bay.

 I hope by the next issue of this newsletter we can get back to celebrating our discoveries and discoverers, and also to make even clearer how our vision can contribute the the revolution in medicine that we espouse. 

Keep safe and sane.

Irv Weissman