IF ONLY IT WERE ABOUT THE SCIENCE:

Sweet cell of success (Wayne Smith, March 22, 2005, The Australian)

ALAN Mackay-Sim and his small team of researchers investigating the human sense of smell have tended to get up the noses, pardon the pun, of the serious scientists working in the field of stem-cell exploration.

Most of the real players were to be found studying embryonic stem cells at such long-established research centres as Monash University and the University of Queensland, although the work of those other Australian scientists targeting bone marrow and neural stem cells was also highly regarded.

But no one quite knew what to make of Mackay-Sim's Griffith University team that somehow had taken an odd turn into the murky tributary that is the olfactory mucosa - the organ of smell in the human nose - and begun rowing against the tide by studying adult stem cells taken from the nose.

The prevailing science was that where embryonic stem cells had multi-potentiality and could give rise to all cell types in the body, adult stem cells were old dogs that couldn't be taught new tricks. Even those stem cells in tissues that do regenerate, such as skin, blood and olfactory mucosa, can only give rise to, respectively, more skin, blood and olfactory mucosa, so the accepted wisdom went.

Moreover, there was also the suspicion that adult stem cells were the last refuge of the religious Right, that after 40 years of intensive fossicking in this stream the only scientists still stubbornly panning for gold were those whose ethical beliefs wouldn't allow them to experiment with embryos left over from fertility treatment.

Certainly, adult stem-cell research had long been left behind by governments, corporations and benefactors wanting to sponsor scientific advances. In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger last November was able to persuade voters to approve a $4.04 billion investment in embryonic stem-cell research over the next decade. Meanwhile, by contrast, Mackay-Sim's team laboured away on an annual budget of a couple of hundred thousand dollars, the pickings so slim that one key researcher, Wayne Murrell, was forced to take a scientific time-out to earn some real money by working as manager of a grocery store.

"It has been a disregarded area of research generally," Mackay-Sim, the 2003 Queenslander of the Year, concedes wryly. "Whenever I presented a paper, the feedback I would get was that our work was 'interesting but weird'."

Yesterday, in one of those sublime moments with which the history of science is replete, the tributary might suddenly have become the mainstream. With the publication of Mackay-Sim's research on the Developmental Dynamics website, the twin arguments that adult stem cells lack the multipotency of embryonic stem cells and might not be as useful for stem-cell therapies were abruptly turned on their heads.

As if this will even slow the Death Lobby down.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 21, 2005 11:07 AM