Stem Cell Brain Drain - 20 July 2001

San Francisco, open your Golden Gate and let the brain drain out.

Now that's not, you'll remember, how the old song goes. The second line was a contribution of some smart Alec on spotting the first headline that struck me after arriving in the famous city.

The newspaper story began: "The University of California at San Francisco is losing its top stem cell researcher to Britain because of the political uncertainty threatening the future of his work in the United States."

The political uncertainty, at the moment I'm talking anyway, is whether or not President Bush will ask Congress to uphold a law which was passed in the middle 1990s, which bans the use of federal funds for human embryo stem cell research.

Roger Pedersen, the piece goes on, is a professor of biology and he will take a faculty position at Cambridge University.

He is one of a handful of scientists who have been at the forefront of culling stem cells from human embryos and trying to control their development into new nerves, muscles and other organs.

Professor Pedersen like most, if not all of the other bioscientists involved in this work, has the backing of a private corporation. The issue is whether such research shall have government approval and money.

The day Professor Pedersen's departure was published - it made a banner headline in the San Francisco morning paper - a House of Representatives sub-committee sat down in Washington to hear witnesses on both sides of what has turned into a national debate as passionate and contentious almost as the debate over abortion.

The first witnesses were not doctors but, you might say, patients earnestly representing opposite points of view.

The debate which in fact parallels the abortion debate as a moral argument, turns on whether you consider an embryonic stem cell a human being or more simply the means to develop any type of cell or tissue in the human body and so in time be able to replace or repair damaged organs in sick people.

Witnesses on one side told despairing tales of relatives suffering from one or other of the most disabling diseases who, in the same condition, a generation from now, or in less time, could be made whole.

On the other side there was a man who dramatically held up three tiny children and asked which of the three should have died. They belonged to an infertile couple who'd had their children from donated embryo stem cells.

Like tens of thousands of other embryos they're kept in frozen storage.

The objectors want this research to be confined to adult stem cells.

They were confronted yesterday with a report just issued by the national institutes of health saying that both types of cells are acceptable but embryonic cells show enormous promise - are much more flexible and will proliferate indefinitely.

The whole contest comes down in the end as in the beginning to the old, old question of when you believe a cell turns into a human being.

The anti-abortionists believe that a human is created at the moment of conception and that an embryonic cell is human too and therefore destroying it is an act of murder.

In the 27 years now since the Supreme Court upheld Roe v Wade, legalising abortion, the contending arguments have stayed the same.

The more serious question that springs from this cell stem debate is which way President Bush will lead his administration and does it mean what a year ago would have been thought inconceivable that he really hopes to overturn Roe v Wade and make abortion illegal again?

"That," said a Democrat who chose to remain anonymous, "would be the cue for a revolution."

What he meant was that if that happened the Democrats, with 70% of public opinion behind them and the testimony of millions of abortion beneficiaries, the Democrats would go roaring into possession of the House at least in the Congressional elections next year.

Well now from the mystical or the sublime to the practical.

The first big domestic story I settled to in this earthquake capital, after I'd looked out the window and made sure that the Golden Gate bridge was still in place, carried the doom laden headline: "Dot.com dining is down - and out?"

The implied story is obvious. Since the collapse or bankruptcy of so many internet fortunes by the slumping of the market, "The young guns," said one restaurateur, "The young guns with those dip-in expense accounts, have disappeared.

"The age of our average diner went from 35 to 45 in a matter of a month."

Now that particular restaurant opened at the crest of the 90s boom just over a year ago and that one case points to a much more impressive or depressive general statistic.

In January 2000 the city of San Francisco licensed 298 new restaurants. Long ago somebody called this an eating city if ever there was one. Of those 298, 117 have already folded.

The more alert of the fancier, older restaurants are reluctantly beginning to reprint their menus, aware that the day of the $30 entrée is over.

But this grey picture is brightened when you move down to cheaper and what they call "mid range" restaurants, which are suddenly having a boom - adding to their steady, modest clientele the dot.com unemployed who profess to have developed a new taste for dishes that cost, not $25, but nine or 10.

This has all happened so lately - springing, or rather crawling, from the conviction that the economy is in steady decline - that the travel folders and the hotel brochures have not caught up with the facts.

Their copy, their invitations to luscious feasts and dreamy weekends, still read as if they'd been written by excited imitators of Scott Fitzgerald back in the 1920s, which became known - in retrospect I might say - as the era of wonderful nonsense.

A man who in the fall of 1999 opened a dazzling new restaurant to a stampede of dot.commers now has the same restaurant, but anybody who wants to get into it and make a reservation for tonight can get in.

The first months of 2000 this same man announced in a newspaper interview: "The internet will not go away. These kids are never going to be out of work.

"It's like being around in the salad days of Henry Ford. That industry never faltered, nor will this one."

Today he echoes a marketing colleague: "It changed on the turn of a dime. Who would have thought things would go south so soon?"

As for the salad days of Henry Ford, he now says: "Right now everyone is running for the bunkers and waiting for the radiation to die down so they can go back outside again."

However large or small his losses this man has not lost his gift for colourful speech.

I think my favourite comment on the dwindling of the economy came from another restaurant owner who was plainly not the most piercing observer of social change.

He'd not yet noticed, for publication anyway, that his clientele had aged. The only change he noticed was, he said: "Very odd. We get more requests than we used to to turn the music down."

The third item - which I will not say can be thought peculiar to San Francisco - it is a protest made, I think, more spontaneously here than I imagine in other American cities where there is not, as in San Francisco there is, a very substantial new population of Chinese immigrants. Chinese from Hong Kong, from Taiwan I should guess, overwhelming, a few dissident mainlanders.

It was a letter which appeared the other day in the San Francisco evening paper.

"I am deeply saddened by the recent approval of Beijing to host the 2008 Olympic Games and I'm outraged that the International Olympic Committee has chosen to overlook the systematic destruction of Tibetan culture, and human rights abuses committed by the Chinese government."

I've not heard mention of Tibet in the chorus of protest against the Beijing decision anywhere else.

But I have to say that that chorus anyway was short-lived because the committee's decision in China's favour had been so long expected.

The popular opposition around this country, so far as I can gather, was wholly about the suppression of human rights.

The defence position has many faces and a variety of advocates - not, as many protestors believed, merely the corporations that had already invested in the enormous construction job Beijing, with poor roads, hotels, no vast stadium, is going to have to undertake.

The advocates included both conservative and liberal commentators and they were united by the belief, or the lively hope, that Beijing and the Communist regime will never be the same afterwards.

That, for instance, Beijing, standing in the full glare of global attention, will have to behave well. That young dissidents will have the chance to demonstrate their dissent and defy the government to repeat the Tiananmen Square massacre in full view of the world's television cameras.

Most appealing was the thought that the rush of business and investment might rejuvenate the United States/China trading partnership and loosen the ground under the Communist system itself.

Well, remembering what the Olympic Games did for Seoul and South Korea, that may be not so naïve a hope as it sounds.

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