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.

Men and Near-Men of the Year

Wow... nothing posted since May 27. It would seem that my life got super-exciting since then and took me away from the keyboard. In fact, all that happened was that I was quite busy with consulting work from August to early November, and that we got a puppy in July. Other that that, it's the usual reason: procrastination. And perhaps a lack of something really exciting or infuriating to write about.

I received the TIME Magazine "Person of the Year" edition (and yes, I wrote "Men" in this post's title because I'm only going to talk about men here) and I was thinking of the meaning of some of the choices.

I've already heard the Luddites say that it was preposterous to bestow such a high honor on Mark Zuckerberg, but I think the point is that regardless of his actual personal qualities or limitations (disclosure: I have not seen The Social Network) the phenomenon that he and his company created is of great importance. I consult and write professionally about the importance of social media in the enterprise, and about the fact that companies that try to create an internal social network fail to realize that their employees want to be connected to a mix of colleagues and non-colleagues. Since Facebook and LinkedIn are the primary places that meet this need, they will not become faithful to an internal-only site. My latest paper on this, "If You Build It, They Won't Come" will be published by the Cutter Consortium after the turn of the year.

Now don't take me wrong: I'm interested in this enough that next time I walk by Antonio's Nut House, which is a couple of blocks from where I lived in Palo Alto in 1985-88 and 1993-2000, I may drop in to see if Mr. Zuckerberg is there (he may have to change his unofficial headquarters now that TIME has disclosed this habit), because I would absolutely not mind an autograph. It would be a change from my usual ballet dancers and violinists... OK, violinist. But Facebook (and LinkedIn) are now much bigger phenomena than any boy genius, and will probably not depend on their respective founders to continue (the usual counter-example to this is Stevc Jobs, of course).

The Chilean miners, los trenta y tres, almost made it. Some of them were truly heroic, others were well inspired to follow their leaders' advice. They are important not so much as 33 individual men, but because it showed how a country and the victims could take charge of a rescue operation that some thought was doomed from the start. The "Heckuva job, Brownie" exclamation was a gross sign of incompetence at all levels in the U.S. in 2005. Next time there is a Katrina-like catastrophe in this country, I hope we ask some of these miners, and perhaps the President of Chile and his cabinet, to come here and coordinate the rescue, since they know a thing or two about actually succeeding at a rescue.

And now, the man whose near-designation may be controversial, but who deserves some discussion: Julian Assange. Once again, here is a person who seems to have some deep flaws, and who is alleged to be a repeat sex offender; but regardless of his personality, he is the visible face of a movement to expose diplomatic secrets. I am quite perturbed, frankly, by the attitude of governments and banks toward the Wikileaks organization and even toward Assange himself. First, it has not been proven that Wikileaks participants procured any information illegally. The people who gave them the information may have violated their terms of employment by various governments, so go after them if you have legal standing, but don't blame the messenger.

Secondly, I find the diplomatic niceties tiresome. We all know that foreign dignitaries, be it Karzai, Merkel, or Sarkozy, are not angels. I find it refreshing to hear about the incompetence of the first, the imperiousness of the second, and the vanity of the third. Instead of suing someone for revealing this, the U.S. diplomats should say "oops" and move on, and the big shots who have been described in unflattering terms should look at what they can do to govern more competently or more humbly.

Thirdly, and the TIME article on Assange points it clearly, the financial institutions clearly acquiesced to apply punitive measures to Wikileaks as soon as Ms. Clinton's organization cleared its powerful throat. Paypal suspended processing payments because of "illegal activity" even though it is an allegation that has not been proven. Visa and Mastercard stopped too, even though they still let the Ku Klux Klan have accounts with them. And a Swiss bank has frozen Mr. Assange's account because he is not a permanent resident of Switzerland -- a rule they constantly overlook in other cases. This is just spineless capitulation and, until and unless an actual illegal action has been proven, a sad day for freedom of speech.

Even the fact that he was arrested in London just after the outcry from the U.S. government seems rather suspicious. I can imagine the debates at Scotland Yard: "if we arrest him now, we'll be called lackeys of the U.S. If we don't arrest him, we may be derelict in our duty. Oh, what to do, what to do? Here's an idea: let's arrest him and then free him up on bail. Let's see how this plays out."

So this Person of the Year issue is more interesting than the usual crop. I was especially glad that the designation didn't go to some Tea Party politician, because I doubt that we will remember them much in a few years, and it would have been another U.S.-centric story. Instead, in all the cases I mentioned (Zuckerberg, the miners, and Assange) we have people whose actions have inspired or disturbed the entire world, and who evoke in us some fundamental values that are not only American: connectedness, the love of life, and the right to know what our governments would like to hide.

Another Houston Ballet evening

Woohoo, I got another autographed program cover. Ian Casady (at left) danced the role of Pecos Bill in Pecos by Stanton Welch, and I got him to sign the program bearing his photograph in that role. I say "role" because the piece was more theatrical than anything else, an impression Ian agreed with.

That piece closed a program that started with Ballo della Regina by Balanchine, which pleased one of my companions, since she learned classical ballet for eight years, but was too old-fashioned for me. And as fun as Pecos Bill was, I far preferred the middle part of the program, Sandpaper Ballet, a very abstract piece by Mark Morris, set to Leroy Anderson's music, including such whimsical pieces as Sleigh Ride, the Typewriter, and others.

A Volcano and a Goat

I flew to Paris almost two weeks ago. My plane left Houston five and a half hours late, and arrived in Paris seven hours late. The cause of course, was the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, whose name I can't resist writing since I can spell it without looking it up anymore.

Yesterday morning, I took a train from Paris to Poitiers, where I changed to another train from Poitiers to Angoulême, in order to have lunch with an ex-colleague of mine. The second train, which was coming from Brussels, arrived five minutes late in Poitiers, but then stopped for 20 minutes in the middle of nowhere and arrived in Angoulême 27 minutes late. No, there wasn't an ash cloud along the track: the train ahead of us had hit a goat that was standing on the tracks. Goat against TGV: no contest here. Still, it's probably a good thing that the trains on that section go at about 125 mph (200 kph), not their usual 185 mph (300 kph).

When I was told about the reason for the train delay, I found it rather funny that while a mighty volcano can cause thousands of flights to be canceled and 200,000 passengers to be stranded for days, a humble goat, in the wrong place at the wrong time, can create a smaller commotion, delaying over 1,000 people (between the two trains, assuming it didn't cause an even worse ripple effect) by half an hour.

Newsworthiness or Prejudice?

I posted a first version of this article last week in French. After the situation evolved, and considering my international readers (yes, all two of you), here is an updated version in English.

When I received the e-mail notifying me of the publication of the newsletter of the French Consulate in Houston, Le Trait d'Union (the title means "The Hyphen," but the French phrase evokes the sense of "connection" better than the English word, and therefore implies that it is a means to connect the local French community), I was surprised that one of its articles was entitled Portrait of Annise Parker, First Homosexual Woman in the Houston City Hall.

Upon reading the content, it was clear that while it stated her history, competence, and summed up her campaign, the newly elected mayor's sexual orientation was indeed a key aspect for the author. The article was certainly positive in its tone, but I tended to dismiss this as rather insignificant, because how else was an official publication of a foreign government going to talk about the mayor of its host city anyway? But the tabloid title rubbed me the wrong way.

I then discovered that the newsletter contained no link to respond to the editor, which made me feel like the Consulate only cared about one-way communication, a very "regal" French way of doing things (the French actually use the word régalien to refer to things that authorities do in a way that is reminiscent of the omnipotent kings).

So I composed my very critical (surprise!) response to the Consulate as an open letter, which I posted here and was reflected in my Facebook status. A local French friend saw this, and sent me the contact information for the Consulate's press service, to which I sent the same message in an e-mail. I very quickly got an e-mail back from an official, containing a personal response from the Consul General, Mr. Grandjouan, and I had a nice phone discussion with the gentleman who had relayed the response.

The gist of the reply was that many publications has focused on the new mayor's orientation; that she was very open about being a lesbian; and that it was important to mention this because people tend to have a false image of all Texans as very conservative people. Therefore, the argument went, the article was trying to point out how positive and progressive her election was.

While I acknowledge that there was probably no actual prejudice at work here, and I appreciate the communication effort and the personal attention the Consul gave to my criticism, I still think that the focus on "first gay woman in City Hall" in the title was inappropriate. It would have been fine to talk in the article about the "conservatism" issue. For example, the writer could have written that Ms. Parker has long served the local community as an openly gay woman, that her sexual orientation was not an issue in the campaign (until a last-minute desperate maneuver by her opponent), and that her victory demonstrates that Houstonians are not as socially conservative as people tend to depict Texans in general. This would have been fine in the body of the piece — but you can't claim that something is a non-issue... then try to grab the reader's attention by making it an issue worthy of the headline.

It is also a little ironic that a French publication refers to the sexuality of the Houston mayor in a headline in 2010, given that in 2001 Paris elected a mayor whose homosexuality was public knowledge since 1998. It almost sounded like the author of the article on Ms. Parker had not heard of Mr. Delanoë.

More generally, this reminded me of the general debate about invisibility vs. recognition in the LGBT community. Some people might point out that we are in general trying to be recognized for our presence, contributions, and need of equality. But equality precisely implies that our sexual orientation should not be newsworthy — it is its still-rampant denial that should be.

Of course, what is and should be much more important to the French representatives in Houston, and was completely omitted from the article, is this: in the current climate of a still lingering recession, what will the new mayor do to control its impact on her city? And incidentally, how can the strong French community in Houston, including all the French who work in the Oil & Gas industry, be involved in a mutually beneficial manner in the economic workings of this city?