Stanford Leading Matters (the end): Lecture on Stem Cells

Stanford Leading Matters (the end): Lecture on Stem Cells

Please read the Preamble of the previous post to understand the context of this article. As always, I encourage comments and responses. Remember that you can find and listen to the actual lecture on Stanford on iTunes.

"Stem Cells and the Promise of New Cancer Therapies" by Dr. Henry Weissman

A stem cell has a unique property, which is that when it divides, one of the two resulting cells is also a stem cell. Dr. Weissman took pains, at this point and several times later in his lecture, to debunk the myth that a stem cell can produce any tissue. He said that there are several types of stem cells (blood-forming, bone-forming, muscle-forming, etc.) and that they are not interchangeable at all.

Blood-forming stem cells can be obtained in three ways:

• from the bone marrow
• from "mobilized blood": you can give someone a drug that flushes stem cells into the bloodstream for just a few hours; during that time you can collect as many stem cells as you would normally get from as many as 100 bone marrow taps.
• from umbilical cord blood — but again, people who propose "cures" derived from this source for all sorts of ailments are charlatans.

California has a law (Prop. 71, adopted in 2005) that allows a university to perform clinical trials of treatments that a company might not want to fund. This is what the Stem Cell Research Center at Stanford does.

The speaker described the potential to help fight blood-related and brain-related diseases with stem cells. However, there is a complex interaction between graft rejection mechanisms and stem-cell transplants. You need to circumvent the rejection mechanism to successfully implant foreign stem cells into a person.

Moving to the importance of this research for cancer, Weissman said that when a chemotherapy drug kills ordinary tumor cells but not the tumor stem cells (TSCs), the cancer will regenerate. Leukemia cells carry a CD47 protein that serves as a "don't eat me" signal to macrophages that would otherwise eliminate them. Therefore, antibodies targeted at CD47 seem promising, but so far experiments have only been conducted in the form of xenografts from humans to mice. In those experiments, the antibodies have arrested the development of the cancer cells transplanted into the mice.

In conclusion, Dr. Weissman pointed out that this research has a lot of implications because of the passionate opinions for or against the use of fetal stem cells. He did not shy from the controversy.

An audience member asked about potential solutions that could come from transplants from mice to humans. Dr. Weissman said that unfortunately, mice have about 150 viruses they live with, but which could potentially cause leukemia in humans. There are current efforts to raise virus-free pigs, because their hearts are about the same size as human hearts, so they would be suitable for transplants.

In answer to another question, the speaker said that his research center is performing clinical trials in the UK because patients are covered by a single national health insurance system. In the U.S., he would have to negotiate about the coverage with a number of private insurance companies, and after some of them deny coverage, the remaining sample population for the trials would be small.

Feel free to comment on these last three posts — either about the subject matter or about the usefulness of these notes.

Stanford Leading Matters, continued: Lecture on Innovation

Please read the Preamble of the previous post to understand the context of this article. As always, I encourage comments and responses. Remember that you can find and listen to the actual lecture on Stanford on iTunes.

"Harnessing Collective Wisdom" by Hayagreeva Rao, Professor of Organizations at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

"Darwin's ideas of variations and selection apply to how the C-suite handles innovation."

Key questions about innovation in an enterprise: how do we encourage ideas without creating clutter? And how do we select some ideas, therefore kill some of them, without discouraging people from continuing to submit?

A study by McKinsey found that the way many companies measure innovation is flawed. Metrics and measures and useless without a good system of idea generation, which requires creative people and a positive climate, which in turn is created by good leadership.

In most companies, when you ask people what hinders innovation, you get two very different answers depending whom you ask:

• people at the top think that there aren't enough ideas generated by people below
• people in the trenches say that it is the top echelons of the company that act as a bottleneck

There needs to be a climate of confidence, trust and fun, enabling people to share their ideas and to try new things.

A good predictor of an organization's ability to innovate is how it handles failure. You have to:

1. reward people for trying hard enough that they will fail a certain percentage of the time;
2. make sure that failures are recognized quickly and that projects are stopped when they have failed, freeing resources to pursue others.

Peter Kim, head of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., used to tell people: "if you kill a project, I will give you stock options." At another company, the CEO frequently visits employees and hands them a business card, the back of which looks like a Monopoly "Get out of jail" card. Then he says: "Try something new! If it fails, give your boss this card, and I promise you won't get in trouble." At Amazon, Jeff Bezos gives a monthly award to an employee who did, without asking for permission, something that improved customer satisfaction.

Rite Solutions, a Rhode Island company, has created an internal stock market for ideas, called "Mutual Fun" (a pun on "mutual fund"). This virtual stock market trades cost reduction ideas ("savings bonds"), mildly aggressive ideas ("Bow Jones") and far-out innovations ("SPAZDAQ"). Once this market determines what are the most popular ideas, actual funds are allocated to them. Ideas are never killed by a corporate review board -- they are by the community when the corresponding shares don't sell. This approach also circumvents a common flaw of management review processes: senior managers tend to mostly empathize with people who are a lot like them.

At the end of his talk, Rao was asked about Open Innovation. He said that one size doesn't fit all. "You may not use the same incentives or the same rules with different actors."

Stanford Lecture on Energy

Preamble

In the last six months, I attended two instances of a series of events entitled "Stanford Leading Matters." This is a touring half-day conference that is going through 28 cities, mostly in the U.S. but with some foreign locations too. The purpose is to re-acquaint university alumni with the challenges that Stanford University is addressing. Of course, as a by-product of this goodwill, the university hopes to successfully appeal to their generosity and raise more money for the "Stanford Challenge," a $10 billion fundraiser.

Leading Matters was a rather stellar production, complete with making the meeting hall look like a scale model of the university's inner quad — sandstone arches and all. At every stop, Stanford University President John Hennessy spoke of the university's vision, which is no less than helping solve the world's toughest challenges; incredibly gifted and involved students provided their views in a panel moderated by Hennessy; professors gave lectures on important issues in today's world; and very good food could be sampled.

The 28th and last stop on this tour will be in Portland, Ore., at the end of May 2011. Because I was at a conference in Boston the week immediately preceding the Leading Matters event there, in late September 2010, I added a day to my trip and went. There were about 550 Stanford alumni, spouses and sometimes their college-bound children in attendance. Then, when Leading Matters stopped in Houston a month ago in January, I went again — in part because the faculty lectures and the student panel involved different people each time, therefore it wasn't a complete repetition.

What I am proposing to do in three successive blog posts is to give a summary of the lectures I personally attended (they can all be found and downloaded for free at "Stanford on iTunes" but some readers will appreciate a more personal touch).

Fixing the Energy System — Why Is It So Hard?" by Prof. James Sweeney

Sweeney is the Director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford, thus named because it was founded thanks to a $30 million donation by Jay Precourt.

He stated that there are three drivers for a public energy policy:

• Global climate change
• National security
• Economics

Concerning the first one, the world releases about 30 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. To address CO₂ emissions, we should focus on three things:

• "decarbonizing" the generation of electricity
• reducing the use of oil in transportation
• improving how we use electricity

"Energy efficiency" means the economically efficient improvement of energy use — i.e., something that we can be willing to do not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it will save money.

The possible improvements in the production or use of energy fall into several categories, in terms of their feasibility:

• those for which technology advances are needed
• those for which the technology exists but is currently too expensive
• those that require new regulations
• those against which there are no obstacles, other than our behavioral inertia

Why are some of the energy cost reduction opportunities not being pursued? Sweeney gave several examples:

• Owners or rental property have no incentive to make improvements, for example in insulation: they cost money, but do not allow them to charge more in rent.
• Consumers are not receiving enough information to understand their electricity usage; for example, a cable TV decoder/DVR box uses 45W when it is on, and almost the same when it is off.

The Google Power Meter is a free energy monitoring tool for households. It checks your pattern of electricity consumption, and reports the results a day later. However, apart from the fact that either your utility company must be part of the program (and only a few companies are), or you must install a monitoring device otherwise, Sweeney said that this tool "requires too much analysis by people, and feedback should be more immediate" if we are to obtain real changes in consumer behavior.

Electric utility companies, of course, do not have incentives to reduce consumption. Usually it is the opposite (although he should have mentioned that an increase in peak consumption may cost a utility more than they can recover, because they may need to bring online their most inefficient plants, the one they would otherwise keep shut off, in order to meet the demand). Instead, we should find ways to decouple volume from profit, which California has done through regulation and financial incentives.

For businesses, there should be software packages for energy use management, just like there is to manage and optimize other company resources (people, equipment, etc.). "What you don't measure, you can't manage."

After the speaker ended his talk, someone in the audience, who worked at the Department of Energy for ten years, suggested that there is a rift between blue (Democrat-leaning) and red (Republican-leaning) states: people in red states are opposed to energy management measures because these sound anti-business. Sweeney replied that he did not see this issue as a clear-cut Democrat-vs.-Republican attitude, but he also admitted that as a Republican he could be biased about it.