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Reflections on Cloning

by Judy Bolyard Purdy

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Intro  |  Tangible results  |  Cows, cows & more cows  |  
Genetic preservation  |  Pig Tales
  |  The war against disease

 Eight and Counting

 Charting the Cloning Process

 Promises and Perils

 The Ethics of Cloning

Tangible Results

Stice, a modest and courteous Minnesota native, has a driving passion to do research that can make a tangible difference in people’s lives.

“I want to see my work result in something concrete and applicable,” he said.

KC with Steve Stice.

By just about any measure, it already has. In addition to his many patents and laboratory successes, Stice is helping prepare the next generation of scientists who will build on his work. He lectures graduate level courses; advises master’s and doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows; and directs a vigorous UGA-based research program.

“One of the things I like the most about academe is training graduate students. Being able to help shape and direct a career is very rewarding and they in turn can energize the laboratory,” he said.

Stice is one of the University of Georgia’s nine Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholars. The GRA, a public-private partnership, helps recruit renowned scientists to its affiliated universities and contributes facilities and equipment to research that has economic implications for the state. Biomedical research is among the top GRA priorities.

Stice allocates 51 percent of his effort to the university and splits the remainder between two privately held Athens-based biotech companies: ProLinia Inc. and BresaGen. He serves as chief scientific officer at ProLinia, which he helped found in 1998 to develop and commercialize agricultural applications of cloning research. At BresaGen, Stice is a vice president guiding research efforts to grow human embryonic stem cells. Ultimately, his purpose is to coax these stem cells to differentiate into nerve cells for treating Parkinson’s disease.

The graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, technicians and visiting scientists in his UGA lab work hand-in-hand with the research staff at both biotech companies to advance the agricultural and medical boundaries of cloning and stem cell research.

“We operate as one unit between BresaGen and UGA,” said Ian Lyons, a research group leader at BresaGen. “Acknowledgement of shared intellectual property makes it possible.”

Altogether, Stice’s extended “research family” includes 35 people: the 15 people in his UGA lab that include technicians, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students and visiting scientists; the eight staff at ProLinia, a mix of scientists, technicians and support personnel; and the 12 at BresaGen, most of whom are researchers.

At 41, Stice is already among the more seasoned pioneers in the young field of cloning. In addition to five book chapters on livestock cloning, he has published his research findings in prestigious journals such as Nature and Science and will soon be editing a book on stem cells. Stice said he has filed “somewhere between 20 and 30 patent applications.”

One of those is for a process that vaults cloning’s success rate in cattle from a single digit to a respectable 15 percent.

“While that rate is not yet good enough to make cloning commercially feasible, it moves cloning one step closer to being a viable breeding option,” said Larry Benyshek, head of the UGA animal and dairy science department in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

NEXT

Intro  |  Tangible results  |  Cows, cows & more cows  |  
Genetic preservation  |  Pig Tales
  |  The war against disease

EMAIL THIS     PRINTABLE VERSION


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