New York: Still, Quietly, the Nation's Stem Cell Leader

Mount Sinai School of Medicine's announcement that it has established the Black Family Stem Cell Institute marks another milestone along a path that is more or less invisible in the public debate. While attention focuses on the incredible amount of money that the state has ponied up in California for the science of stem cells, most have missed the fact that there are many more stem cell researchers and labs in New York than in any other state, including Massachusetts and California. And, unlike Massachusetts, which is supposedly bleeding scientists to California at an alarming rate, New York's stem cell community is, albeit anxiously, growing.

There's still no question that San Francisco, should it get the headquarters for the $3 billion California agency, would become the critically important location for stem cell research someday. Why then are most New Yorkers staying, so far? It could be the talent - key people with Nobel prizes in the field have very happy homes near Columbia University. But these big guns are being courted by California:

“They feel the venture-capital money will be easier there,” [a prominent NYC researcher] says. His colleagues are also being courted. Lorenz Studer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center—perhaps the city’s most accomplished Parkinson’s researcher working with human embryonic stem cells—says he’s gotten feelers from Stanford and the Burnham Institute in San Diego. California also has come calling for Mount Sinai’s Gordon Keller, who is using human embryonic stem cells to work toward treating blood diseases. “I have gotten some e-mails, yes, from San Diego,” Keller says. “Just, Would you be interested in coming to look? Certainly. I’m going out there to give some seminars anyway. How can you not go?” Since Proposition 71 passed, doctors say the medical centers have been abuzz about who might stay and who might go. Some say the measure even played a role in one departure before Election Day: Arnold Kriegstein, a researcher who led Columbia’s neural stem-cell initiative for eleven years, packed up his lab in August and left for the University of California at San Francisco...

[But] New York has been the epicenter of more than its share of medical breakthroughs: chemo and radiation, blood transfusions, X-rays, aids therapies. For all that, the accomplishments of our scientists rarely command the spotlight. Maybe it’s just the city’s cacophony of braying interests: New York is the capital of so many things—finance, advertising, fashion, the media—that Big Medicine gets lost in the shuffle. But despite their lack of glamour, the hospitals, medical schools, and research centers are the largest employers in New York; the hospitals alone generate at least $1 billion a year in tax revenue. And it’s not just the size of the industry, it’s the quality. In the past six years, five Nobel Prizes have been awarded to New York scientists. Medicine here is in many respects what the city does best; sensational hospitals feel like a New York entitlement—not something that could slip away at any moment. And that is true of its key stem cell players: Columbia, NYU, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Mount Sinai, Weill-Cornell, Rockefeller, and Yeshiva’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

So it could be talent or location that is preventing a massive brain drain to California. And there is the other reason ... Just as Dr. Keller was preparing to leave NYC to discuss "feelers" with folks out there, Mount Sinai figured out how to keep him: with an endowed institute that allows him to stay in New York. New York will find a way to raise enough stem cell money to compete with California, but it will take time. "Harold Varmus says Memorial Sloan-Kettering is financing the work of scientists like Lorenz Studer with donations. And Gerald Fischbach says Columbia will set aside at least 10,000 square feet of space for stem-cell research. “We’re not going to get sidelined,” Fischbach says. “I won’t let that happen. We’re gonna make a huge effort to raise private funds for embryonic stem cells.”

Ultimately though the big ticket is still the New York legislature in Albany, which is now sitting on the hold button. So, quietly, the nerve center for stem cell research quietly awaits a verdict from the people who will ultimately decide whether the key state for stem cell research is on the east or west coast.

[updated]The list of core science advisors to the California initiative from outside the state has just been named, and 5 of 8 of them are New York folks: "Ali Brivanlou, a 45-year-old developmental biologist at Rockefeller University in New York, considered one of the up-and-comers of his field; Alexandra Joyner, a developmental biologist at New York University; blood-disease expert Stuart Orkin of Harvard University; Lou Gehrig's disease expert and neurologist Jeffrey Rothstein of Johns Hopkins University; Pablo Rubenstein, founder of an umbilical-cord-blood program at the New York Blood Center; George Yancopoulis, a respected researcher of neurological disorders at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Tarrytown, N.Y.; and Alan Trounson, a well-known stem cell expert in Australia."