Dr. James Thomson
John D. MacArthur Professor
School of Medicine and Public Health
University of Wisconsin, Madison
will be addressing the Vancouver Institute on January 23, 2010 at 8:15 p.m., Lecture Hall No. 2 in the Woodward Instructional Resources Centre, University of British Columbia.
Dr. Thomson is director of regenerative biology at the Morgridge Institute for Research and a member of the Genome Center of Wisconsin, where he conducts his research. Dr. Thomson directed the group that reported the first isolation of embryonic stem cell lines from a non-human primate in 1995, work that led his group to the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cell lines in 1998. He was featured on the cover of TIME magazine in 2001 under the heading: “the man who brought you stem cells is one of America’s best in science and medicine.” In 2007 Dr. Thomson's team succeeded in isolating similar pluripotent stem cells from human somatic cells, and in spring 2009 the journal Science published their discovery of vector-free induced pluripotent stem cells.
