At this week’s World Stem Cell Summit, during one of the panel discussion I was on a member of the audience asked a great question.
In terms of making a broader impact on politics, who out there in the stem cell field might be the Einstein of the stem cell field? Who has the gravitas to write a letter like Einstein did along with fellow physicists Szilard and Eugene Wigner to argue to Roosevelt about the need for a U.S. atomic program?
My answer was that the stem cell field has quite a few leaders, but that I didn’t see any single person who was at the rock star level of Einstein that the public knows very well. There are many amazing leaders in the stem cell field.
With Steve Jobs passing away, which is a very sad occasion, I also got to thinking is their a leader in the stem cell field who has the creative genius of Jobs combined with his ability to turn things into practical, ingenious products.
I’d be curious of your opinions! Are these leaders out there?
Of course one fundamental difference betweens stem cell science and computer or physics is that our products have to go through FDA approval before they can be sold. I don’t think anyone can make some revolutionary stem cell product in their parents garage like Jobs did.
Obviously we work in a hurry and ethics and politics want to know what kind of things are we doing, but I think research is not one person, research are many people. Please we do not need leaders, please we need ideas, hypothesis, discussion, journals, etc. I never want to learn the name of someone, that is matter for me and for good researchs. Why you need my name, only you need is what are I doing, what kind of journals I published, what are my interest. After all my name is not important only men like names, only men like win a nobel prize. I am a women give work and after I will want to retorn my home with my family. Give me science no names please.
I ever raised similar questions about “who is the leading role of synthetic biology”, and “who is the leading role of synthetic RNA biology” after I heard the news that Jobs passed away.
Your view makes sense. We don’t need a real person as leadership in science research, but we need the sparkling ideas. But I believe knowing the leading role in certain scientific research field is not that bad. The name of leading role, and the ideas of the leading role, can never be separated, just like some physics hypothesis and principles are named after their corresponding founders.