Never say die

摘要

"Oh crap, this really puts us in the spotlight!" thought Robert Lanza when he first heard the news. Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), the biotechnology company in Marlborough, Massachusetts, of which Lanza is chief scientific officer, had for more than a year been operating in the shadow of Geron, a rival company in Menlo Park, California. Geron was bigger and better funded than ACT, and it was the first company to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to test a therapy in humans based on embryonic stem (ES) cells. ACT was second. But in November, Geron announced that it was halting its trial to focus instead on cancer drugs. And with the announcement, Lanza says, he felt the weight of the ES-cell field fall on his shoulders.