Fernando Camargo: No limits to learning about stem cells

A dult stem cells are essential for tissue maintenance and repair. If the biology of these cells can be fully understood, their therapeutic possibilities may be limitless. To Fernando Camargo, who first worked on adult stem cells as a graduate student under Peggy Goodell (1), the possibilities of a research career also seemed endless. This enthusiastic outlook buoyed him as he skipped doing a traditional postdoc in favor of a position as a White-head Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research of the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology, where he explored the regulation of hematopoietic stem cell lineages (2, 3) and how organ size is regulated during development (4, 5). We reached Camargo at his lab at Harvard's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology to learn about the many possibilities he sees ahead. I understand you're from South America… Right. I was born and grew up in Arequipa, in the Andes of Peru. My father is an onion farmer, and I think he wanted me to become a farmer, too, but my mother, who was a principal in an all-girls school, always pushed my brothers and me to study hard in school. I think I fi rst became interested in medicine when I was 11, when a cousin of mine died of pan-creatic cancer. That marked me—I always knew I wanted to do something medicine related, such as become a physician like some of my uncles. In Peru, you go straight to professional school after high school, so I started medical school directly. But I was only there for about six months when I realized that a career in research would be more exciting to me. Everyone I spoke to said that, if I wanted to do biomedical research, I should try to go abroad. So I applied to 30 or 40 schools, but only one of them, the University of Arizona, gave me a full scholarship, so that was where I went. What did you study in Arizona? I was a biochemistry major, and the fi rst thing I did was to look at the catalog of faculty members to see which ones had labs. Within my fi rst two months I joined Bob Erickson's lab. They were doing gene therapy, which seemed very exciting to me. So I joined the lab and learned all the basic stuff: how to pipette, how to handle mice, and how to …