New Stem Cell Journal in Print this Month

A while back, Kristen reported that a new journal, Cell Stem Cell would be available this summer. The first issue became available online at the beginning of this month. Cell Stem Cell is a big deal because it's published by Cell Press, a highly respected family of journals often cited in the media.

My first observation – The inaugural issue contains five articles that describe recent research. Several of them deal with epigenetics, an extremely hot field of biology that literally means above genetics. Epigenetics is the science of understanding how and when genes are turned on and turned off. This fascinates stem cell researchers because they want to know the differences between normal cells and stem cells. Many of those differences are epigenetic. Understanding the pattern of genes that are switched on and off and when the switches should be flipped may make it clear how to turn ordinary cells into stem cells and how to turn stem cells into flesh and bone.

My second observation: this is the new rocket science. Papers about stem cell research are really hard to read. I have a background in materials science and biochemistry. That allows me to read a pretty wide variety of scientific journals without looking up lots of new words. Stem cell papers read like the instructions for installing an industrial servo motor – lots of numbers and letters that look like gibberish to the untrained eye. Understanding these papers requires familiarity with a large number of different proteins and an unusually large amount of jargon.

For example, here is a gem from the research article shRNA Knockdown of Bmi-1 Reveals a Critical Role for p21-Rb Pathway in NSC Self-Renewal during Development:

Polycomb group (PcG) genes are epigenetic gene silencers that preserve transcription patterns to maintain cell identity (Lund et al., 2004, Buszczak et al., 2006), a function clearly compatible with a role in self-renewal. At postnatal stages, knockout of Bmi-1, a member of the polycomb family, has a profound effect on NSCs (Molofsky et al., 2003, Zencak et al., 2005), reducing forebrain SVZ neurosphere frequency by 80% at 30 days after birth (Molofsky et al., 2003). With time in culture, neurospheres derived from all stages, including embryonic, showed a dependence on Bmi-1 for self-renewal, displaying a marked reduction in secondary sphere formation. The dependence on Bmi-1 for stem cell maintenance has been explained by Bmi-1-mediated suppression of the Ink4a/ARF cell cycle inhibitory proteins, p16 and p19, whose activities increase with postnatal age and time in culture, and which are upregulated further in the Bmi-1 knockout mouse compared to wild-type (Jacobs et al., 1999, Molofsky et al., 2003). In contrast to these postnatal findings, Bmi-1 knockout has only a modest effect on the incidence of CNS forebrain stem cells at embryonic stages through birth, when the vast majority of diverse neural cells are generated. The mechanisms underlying self-renewal at these stages are unclear, and the reason for their reduced dependence on Bmi-1 is unknown.

What can go wrong when it almost takes a PhD to understand half of the papers that are published in a new field of science?

First off, this might be a big part of why a big slice of the public is hostile toward stem cell research of any kind – not just the embryonic stuff. Stem cell research is so complicated it makes it difficult for scientists to communicate what they're doing to the media. If the media is in the dark, the public will not have a clear picture of what really goes on in labs across the world. This could be why we hear the same exact messages in every stem cell story that is covered by the mainstream media. Stem cells might be able to cure some horrible disease, conservatives appalled. It is extremely hard for reporters to explain exactly what the researchers have done and how they have done it.

The second lesson we can take from this is just how much motivation and quality education is necessary to pursue a career in cutting edge biological science. In California, public schools don't even teach kids what a chemical reaction is until the fifth grade. To prepare the next generation of scientists for the kind of complicated work that appears in Cell Stem Cell, we need to get them started a on learning the fundamental concepts of chemistry, molecular biology, genetics, and computer science a lot earlier. We need to think long and hard about how to make this material digestible and attractive to young people.

In the days of yore, journals were the fastest and most efficient forums for scientists to share their work. Researchers would write a paper that describes their work, the paper would go through a review process, and sometimes other researchers write responses, which would also go through a review process and several months later a collection of papers would be printed. The peer review process is essential for preserving accuracy, and it is a big part of what makes science great, but there is also a great need for faster and more informal type of communication.

What disappoints me about the new Cell Stem Cell website is that it does not contain any message boards, a feature that open access journals like Chemistry Central have included from their inception. This would allow scientists to ask the authors of a paper questions, the research community to add conclusions that the authors did not think of, and the public to react to the societal implications of the work. Chemists and biologists have lagged far behind engineers, legal scholars, and politicians in embracing blogs, wikis, and message boards. This is partially the fault of the publishers that have a stranglehold on scientific communication and little motivation to change.