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Michael D. West

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Dr. Michael D. West is the Chairman of the Board, the Chief Scientific Officer, and former CEO of Advanced Cell Technology Corporation, which specializes in Stem Cell research. Dr. West was the founder of Geron Corporation and served as its Director and Senior Executive Officer from 1990 to 1998. Dr. West's 2003 book The Immortal Cell (ISBN 0385509286) tells his personal story of his religious, business and scientific struggles to deal with the problem of human aging.

It was previously claimed, on Wikipedia, that Michael West was first person to clone a human embryo. This claim is based on the paper:

Cibelli JB, Lanza RP, West MD, Ezzell C. The first human cloned embryo. Sci Am. 2002 286, 44-51.

The first author on this paper is J.B. Cibelli. The first author on a paper is usually taken to be the person who has done most of the work. As Michael West is third author it would be a stretch of the imagination to say that he was the first person to clone a human embryo.

Similar controversy of claiming credit has recently plagued the cloning field, e.g. Ian Wilmut's claim to have cloned Dolly the sheep when it was Keith Campbell. One of the companies founded by Dr. Michael D. West Geron Corp. has licenced patents for "cloning" technology from Ian Wilmut which are now in doubt.


Quotes

  • "Ultimately, the dream of biologists is to have the sequence of DNA, the programming code of life, and to be able to edit it the way you can a document on a word processor." ("On Living Forever," interview with Michael West, Ubiquity magazine, wwww.megafoundation.org, June 2000.)
  • "I could take a Y chromosome from Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Chromosome X from Bob Barker, a Chromosome 6 from Robin Cook, and so on, and assemble a human being with 46 parents, all male for that matter - a child with 46 fathers and no mother." (sic 1)
  • "All I think about, all day long, every day, is human mortality and our own aging." (Stephen Hll, "The Recycled Generation," New York Times Magazine, Jan. 30, 2000)
  • "In a thought experiment, we can imagine making body components one-by-one, each made young by cloning. Then our body would be made young again segmentally, like an antique car is restored by exchanging failing components... I can take a cell from a 100-year-old person and make a brand-spanking-new dimpled babe - doesn't that in itself tell us something about the immortal substratum of life?" (sic 1)

See also

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