Your son and daughter have diabetes, which must be a huge incentive to develop a cure for the disease. How far have you got?
In type 1 diabetes we have two problems. There is an absence of insulin-producing beta cells and also an autoimmune attack, which is what killed the cells in the first place. Our lab and others have worked on the first problem and I am confident we will get buckets of beta cells. When I started this, I thought that by the time I got to making beta cells the autoimmune problem would have been solved. In fact, it is very difficult problem.
How did your son respond to you creating beta cells from skin cells?
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He said: 鈥淒ad, this has taken you eight years and you are telling me you have solved two out of four or five steps. What are you excited about?鈥� I told him that this shows it is doable. We will fill in the other steps.
How are you going to stop beta cells from being attacked by the immune system?
The goal here is to find the root cause, but that is going to take a long time. If you wanted to design a thought experiment to get at the cause of type 1 diabetes, it would go as follows. We would clone a person with diabetes 100 times. We would put them in different environments, feed them different foods, give them different viruses and every 5 minutes take blood samples and do pancreatectomies to try to figure out the cause. Obviously we are not going to do that experiment.
So what can we do to find the cause?
Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) give us an alternative. I see no reason why I can鈥檛 use iPS cells to reconstruct human diseases such as diabetes in mice. What we aim to do is create the human cells involved in diabetes 鈥� immune, thymus and beta cells 鈥� from iPS cells and put them into a humanised mouse, essentially a living test tube. The plan will be to watch human diabetes develop in a mouse. If that happens it opens a door to a problem that no one has been able to study. Then I have to work out which cell screws up first.
What do you think about how stem cell research is regulated?
One nation, and only one, has a sensible approach to making policy on this difficult subject, one that raises questions about what it means to be human, when does life begin and so on. I am a great fan of the way the UK has handled stem cell policy. But the US is a mess. It鈥檚 an embarrassment. Sometimes I wonder how America can survive, the way it makes decisions.
Where do you see the future of stem cell research?
Stem cells are the key to understanding our natural mechanism for repair and replenishment. But why wait to get sick? Why not keep us healthy? I am not interested in immortality. I am interested in living between the ages of 30 and 70 feeling more like a 30-year-old.
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is co-director of the in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He originally worked on frog development, but when his infant son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes he switched his focus to using stem cells to find new treatments for the disease.