One could call it the rhetoric of money and momentum. "Bidding wars," "stealing" and "fierce" competition. It's all are part of the coverage of California stem cell issues that is emerging in the wake of the announcement that a noted Japanese researcher is opening a lab in San Francisco.
Dale Carlson, chief communications officer at the California stem cell agency, fed the generally positive stories with the separate release of a list of nearly 50 other researchers who have moved to California since the passage of Prop. 71. The list turned an already meaty scientific story into an even meatier one – a trend with national and global implications.
Reporter Daniel Levine of the Journal of Life Sciences produced a good example. His Aug. 20 piece was headlined "Money Changes Everything." He wrote that the move by Shinya Yamanaka caps a trend that has "changed the landscape for stem cell research by drawing top scientists to the Golden State."
Levine also queried Stanford, UCLA and UC San Francisco to flesh out the scientific migration and recruitment story.
We are likely to see at least a few more stories along this line as the news filters out from scientific and regional publications.
In another story on the Yamanaka move, reporter Ron Leuty of the San Francisco Business Times said that Yamanaka expects to be reprogramming human cells to create embryonic stem cells in the "next year or two."
Leuty also reported that the scientist is expected eventually to move his entire lab operation to the Gladstone Institutes. Yamanaka has a 20 person lab at Kyoto University. The Gladstone operation is expected to have four to six persons shortly.
Leuty said the "first fellow" in Yamanaka's California operation is funded by a grant from the California stem cell agency.
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