Sweating the Details: An Interview with Jamie Thomson

If you had to name the most controversial scientific achievement of the past decade, you’d be hard pressed to top the development of human embryonic stem [ES] cells. Human ES cells followed on the heels of another major technological advance—Dolly, the cloned ewe. Together, these remarkable breakthroughs have stimulated great public interest and have ushered in a new era in the exploration of human biology. At the center of the ES maelstrom is a soft-spoken and intensely private scientist from the Genome Center at the University of Wisconsin. Jamie Thomson (Image 1), who is also Director of Regenerative Biology at the new Morgridge Institute for Research and the founder of two companies, is purposeful, with an obvious knack for a difficult experiment, yet seems a bit uncomfortable in the limelight his work has generated. Trained as a veterinarian and research scientist, Thomson had a dual passion for experimental embryology and species preservation. He was just emerging from his post-doctoral fellowship at the Primate Center in Oregon when he moved to Wisconsin. He was hired there with the specific goal of deriving ES cells from primates, a feat he accomplished in short order. Within a few years, working closely with the ethics and in vitro fertilization (IVF) communities, he succeeded in deriving human ES cells. More recently, pushing the boundaries of human developmental biology even further, his laboratory reported the creation of induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, a way for turning human differentiated cells back into ES cells. I sought out Jamie in mid-April during a cold, umbrella-inverting rainstorm. With daughter in tow, I borrowed my sister’s red MINI Cooper and headed off from her home in Milwaukee to Madison. After struggling with the concept of paying for parking by phone, we puddle-jumped our way to Thomson’s building and literally stumbled into a sign celebrating the first synthesis of DNA, one of a series of placards that extol the long line of important discoveries made at this University. I located Thomson in his office down a quiet hallway, abandoned my daughter to the tea room and her assigned reading in To Kill a Mockingbird, and to the soothing sound of the University of Wisconsin coal train outside his window, we began the interview. Gitschier: The first thing I want to talk to you about is how you got into this business. Thomson: In college, I liked biology, and I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with it. I was good at mathematics. I was trying to find a way to put the two of them together in a biophysics major. But I was spending a summer at Woods Hole, doing population biology stuff, because I thought that was a good overlap with understanding mathematics. Gitschier: What kind of organism were you working on? Thomson: I was working on the salt marshes with Melampus bidentatus, which is a little snail. And I was up to my knees in