BW: That actually segues well into my next question. How did you become interested in stem cells — to write the book?
MG: It started in doing a couple of stories here and there. A professor at New York Met College started talking about the heart — cardiac stem cells. The heart has stem cells. It was taught in med school, at least when I went, that you’re born with all the heart and brain cells you’re ever going to have. We spent most of our college years trying to kill them off with tequila.
Now it turns out we’ve got lots and lots of stem cells in the brain and the heart and so forth — and now the trick is just a matter of turning them on. So that piqued my interest a little bit. Then, through a colleague of mine, I met Robin Smith, who’s my co-author. She’s only recently retired as CEO and chairman of what was originally an adult stem cell banking company. She said, “You know, I’m having trouble explaining to people what adult stem cells are, what their uses are.” The science was only getting started on this. This was maybe 10 years ago. She asked if I could help explain that with some videos and clear, simple language. That’s basically what I do — so the more we got into it, the more interesting it all became. We put something together a few years later for the first Vatican conference on stem cells — back in 2011 (I thought I was being punked when she first suggested it), and it’s amazing what we’ve found since then.
BW: So science communication is going to be pretty invaluable in the future.
MG: You know what? I think it’s one of the most important things, certainly that I’ve ever done professionally. You’re right, early on, when I first started doing this, it seems like ages and ages ago, I spent a lot of time convincing physicians and researchers to talk about their work and to try to get them to explain it. I was lucky in that I could speak their language. It was easier for me than it may have been for someone else. Eventually scientists in the New York area realized I knew what I was talking about, and they could trust me to not only get it right — but not sensationalize it.
I spent a lot of time convincing them that it was important, and there are a number of arguments that I used. One I think is that researchers like to say, “Well, give me my grant money; I’ll do my research and just leave you alone.” I said, “Well, that’s not right. This is tax money, most big research is done with NIH funding. You owe it to the public to tell them what you’re doing with your money.” Sometimes it helped, sometimes didn’t, but in a bigger picture kind of way, the public needs to understand what medicine is doing, what research is doing, and have it explained in a simple and understandable way, so that they’ll support the research. If they don’t understand it, it’s going to be tough to get the general public to support research, and on the flip side, it becomes very easy for people to distort research and what research is being done and how it’s being done — to twist it to their own ends.
That’s sort of what was being done with stem cells — that there were groups that for whatever reason, muddied the waters on what was being done with stem cells. I still can’t talk with some people. I interviewed patients who had adult stem cells put in after a heart attack in clinical trials, what they thought when they were going through these trials using stem cells. A couple of the folks down there — and they were educated people, not hillbillies from the mountains or anything, said “Wait, they’re going to grind up babies and put them in my heart?” I mean literally — that was his quote. It got so distorted that people — I suspect, it slowed down enrollment for clinical trials, and I’m certain it was part of the reason that public support for these things died down.
So that’s important, and I think it’s especially important that people know right now how close we are right now to making some truly transformational discoveries in everything from cancer to rare diseases to genetics. You can almost name any field of medical science, and we’re going to change all of it. It’s that overused phrase that I think this time is real — a “paradigm shift” — I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard that phrase over the last 35 years, but I think now it’s pretty close to being true — in the way we practice medicine and treat diseases.
BW: So what advice would you have for someone pursuing a career in science or medicine?
MG: There’s research and then there’s clinical practice.
Clinical medicine is really in the process of changing whether it’s the Affordable Care Act or some variation of that or nothing at all, you never know what the field is going to look like in the next couple of years — the way reimbursement and so forth is different from the way it was when my generation was going to medical school. That way, a lot of my friends and colleagues who went to med school back in the ’70s are very unhappy now because it’s a different business model these days.
But medical schools are expanding — we’ve got two or three new medical schools here in the New York area alone. They’re having no problem filling their classes. So the kids are coming in with a different expectation — it’s a “quality of life” trade-off versus “being your own boss” kind of practice model from the older days. So if you’re going into clinical practice, the advice there is — it sounds trite, but work as hard as you possibly can, but put your patients’ needs and requirements ahead of your own.
In research, that’s a little different. It’s a difficult time right now because we are losing an entire generation of new scientists right now. It’s really disturbing because funding has been cut back so much and proposals are to cut it back even more drastically. Even grant proposals that get accepted more are from scientists who are older, who have more of a reputation, over the young investigator. So if the young investigators aren’t getting funded, they’re not going to have a job. They’re mostly running on “soft money” — they’re not really tenured, and many of them are getting out of their field.
So I guess the advice there is to take a hard look at what field you’re going into and understand what the issues are these days, perhaps even have a plan B in your pocket. That’s why so many of these young investigators are going into private industry. Every senior scientist is saying this is a crisis — we’re losing people we’re not going to get back easily or quickly. Twenty years from now, Nobel Prizes aren’t going to be given to very many Americans, I’m afraid.
BW: So what can we do? What advice would you have for ordinary people looking to support science given the current climate?
MG: Well, there’re two things.
One is the usual advice of “Make your voice heard.” I moderate a lot of scientific panels for different organizations patient support and so forth. They say the same thing at the end that I echo to other groups — you have to make your voice heard — tell your elected representatives that this is important. You care about it, and you vote. If you don’t, it’s real easy to slash funding. We’ve always been a nation of “squeaky wheel” funding — the ones who make the most noise get the most funding for research.
Secondly, if you happen to be fortunate enough to have disposable income, put your money where your mouth is — fund some philanthropic group for research. For the last six or seven years, I’ve raised $20,000 doing a bike ride for the American Heart Association every summer those will make a difference. Provide the kind of seed money for young investigators: basic funding so they can do their preliminary work and have the data they need when applying for grant money from places like the NIH.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2018 issue of Brain World Magazine.
