Readers of The Niche will recall that I’ve been skeptical of the efforts of the de-extinction firm Colossal Bio.
For instance, I don’t believe they de-extincted dire wolves. They did make woolly mice, maybe their fluffiest (in a real sense) achievement. The point of that apparently was to be on the road to de-extincting woolly mammoths. After all these years, that objective is still a terrible idea.
Now, oddly, the firm is teaming up with the Trump administration.
Before we get into that, the ISSCR annual meeting was this week in Montréal, Canada. It’s been a few years since I attended one of these. I feel a bit of FOMO about that. It’s exciting that next year’s meeting will be in San Francisco, not so far from Sacramento. Did anyone go to ISSCR 2026? Highlights?
Colossal teams up with Trump admin
Here’s the news on Colossal: Trump Administration Moves to Preserve Cells and DNA of Imperiled Species, NYT. I’m conflicted about this development. Preserving cells from endangered species makes sense, in theory, but the context is important.
The administration seems much less concerned with actual living endangered species and preventing extinction. That’s a big concern. I also wonder why Colossal is apparently going to spend tens of millions of its own funding on this collaboration without any return.
Is this a PR thing? Balance for the controversy surrounding de-extinction? Just for public good?
We don’t want to fall for the phony idea that extinction is not so bad because we can just de-extinct species at some future date. It’s fantasy.
FDA Commish finalists
I’ve been wondering now for a long time who will be the new leader of the FDA.
We now have some clues such as from this story: White House reviewing top contenders to lead FDA. Subtitle: “Heidi Overton, a White House adviser; Jeffrey Vacirca, an oncologist and health system executive; and Stephen Ferrara, a health affairs official at the Department of Defense.” I’ve never heard of any of these folks. Do you know anything about them? I don’t have high hopes for the FDA regardless of who’s picked to lead it. The real decision maker probably is RFK Jr. anyway.
Recommended reads
- A genome-scale CRISPRi perturbation atlas of human induced pluripotent stem cells, Nat Biotech.
- Bryan Johnson’s chronic disease is notoriously difficult to diagnose“Longevity entrepreneur Bryan Johnson is drawing attention to autoimmune gastritis”, STAT.
- Human stem cell-based embryo model governance: Insights from Japan, Cell Stem Cell.
- Generation of human appetite-regulating neurons and tanycytes from pluripotent stem cells, Cell Stem Cell.
- The smart way to regulate the peptide boom The FDA should take a middle-ground approach instead of outright banning popular but unproven peptides, STAT. The argument here is basically to accept the reality of massive American consumer demand for unproven, risky peptides. Just give in by having the FDA allow compounding so the peptides will have fewer contaminants via US pharmacy production. I strongly disagree. Peptides like BPC-157 are unproven drugs with real, inherent safety risks, regardless of how they were produced. Note that this STAT item comes from Trump’s first Surgeon General, Jerome Adams.
I was at ISSCR. What do you want to ask?
Hi Jeanne,
What were the most exciting talks? ClinicaL trial data? Interesting stuff from more informal discussions? Lots on SCBEMs?
From Jeanne Loring:
I’ve had the amazing luck of being part of the first generation of human pluripotent stem cell biologists. At the ISSCR meeting in 2003 the talks were mostly about fetal stem cells, somatic stem cells, and mouse and zebrafish models. This year’s meeting beautifully showed how far we’ve come since then. There were talks about the progress of stem cell clinical trials for Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and autoimmune disease.
There was a lot about the movement to use NAMs (non-animal models) for studying human development and disease, like iPSC-derived organoids and complicated structures that looked a bit like human embryos; I especially liked the talk about repeating the famous Mangold-Spemann frog experiment that gave the first insights into how an embryo is formed from an amorphous ball of cells.
I think that my favorite talk, though, was the introduction that reminded us of the seminal work of Sir John Gurdon, who shared the Nobel Prize with Shinya Yamanaka for his fundamental work in embryology. He died last year. All of us can trace our scientific roots to the experiments he did to clone a frog in 1962.
I’ve been fortunate in my career to contribute to the birth and growth of other great technologies – genomic modification of mice and sequencing of the human genome. I started out my research life in embryology, and it is gratifying to see that while it once was considered to be just a tough course one had to have to get into vet school, it has become the most important field after all.