A capacity crowd packed the main auditorium of Yale's Anlyan Center June 18 for an informal lunchtime presentation, "Stem Cells: Everything You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask." Presenting were Haifan Lin, Ph.D., director of the Yale Stem Cell Center and Robert Mandelkern, Connecticut state coordinator of the Parkinson's Action Network and a member of the Connecticut State Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee.

Using headshots of the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger in different guises to illustrate different cell types, Dr. Lin explained the differences between ordinary cells and stem cells, and the characteristics of somatic, embryonic, and induced pluripotent stem cells. He pointed out that understanding stem cells may be key to understanding how cancer develops, and that stem cells could be used to expedite drug discovery because they can serve as proxies for human tissue in drug screening.

Himself a Parkinson's patient, Bob Mandelkern spoke of the promise that therapies based on stem cell research might one day be available for a host of diseases that currently have no cure. While acknowledging recent discoveries that pluripotent cells can be developed from cells such as adult skin cells, he said the "gold standard" remains cells developed from the inner cell mass of the blastocyst. He praised Connecticut for taking a leadership position in stem cell funding at the state level, and called on the Federal government to expand funding of embryonic stem cell research as well.