The first lab of Pimm’s new series turned out to be the Bernstein Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco focusing on heart muscle regeneration. Unlike other professors, Harold Bernstein is extra fast, he answered my questions within 8 hours. This web-availability, rare within academic circles, positively correlates with the design and functionality of the Bernstein lab webpage, which was the first candidate of the lab website competition. I especially like that it is not a lab site built around the PI only, but it focuses on the team at work which is quite big (more than 30 members, 8 postdocs). The lab got a $2,229,140.00 California ESC grant (first year $531,888) on Modeling Myocardial Therapy with Human Embryonic Stem Cells.
The answers of professor Harold Bernstein’s are as follows:
1. What is your scientific background and how did you get immersed into stem cell research? What was the motivation behind that?
I trained in human genetics, receiving a Ph.D. Toward the end of my graduate studies, I realized that I wanted to know more about human biology, and so I entered medical school, and subsequently received an M.D. I have always been interested in the regulation of cell proliferation versus differentiation, since that is a key decision point in the formation of many mammalian tissues. Especially in some organs, such as brain, muscle and heart, the paradigm has been that once the decision to differentiate has been made, there is no turning back, hence, “terminal differentiation.” Stem cells seemed like the most likely model system in which to pursue our questions, and the advent of human ES cell technology has provided an unprecedented opportunity to examine human tissue development.
2. Who were your masters and supervisors? Read the rest of this entry »
