Try to arrive just before a comet or an asteroid struck our planet and set off an ecological cataclysm. That’s what science now thinks happened to the dinosaurs, anyway.
If you got there before that, what you would see was a world dominated by huge reptiles, with some little insignificant mostly rat-like things scurrying around in the underbrush, things that had hair and nursed their young. We call them mammals, and though nobody knew it, they were about to inherit the earth.
Now, come back to last week, when the news was dominated by the troubles of a modern-day dinosaur called General Motors. Now, I‘m not saying GM is about to die.
But it is clear that it is going to be a much smaller part of our economic future.
Something else happened last Thursday, however, that was totally overlooked by the media and which may well be the equivalent of the first Congress of the Mammals.
That is to say, the first major meeting of our intellectual, and what may be our economic, futures. Quietly, without fanfare, more than a dozen of the state’s top stem cell researchers met with life science industry representatives at the University of Michigan.
Their purpose was to discuss ways they could all work more closely together. This meeting wouldn’t have been possible a year ago, by the way. But the voters last November ended Michigan’s outlawing of virtually all embryonic stem cell research. That happened the same day we helped elect a new president.
And this winter, President Obama signed an executive order permitting federal funding of such research.
Part of the meeting last week won’t be terribly controversial. Everyone agrees that collaboration among Michigan’s universities is key from the standpoint of science. But there may be some eyebrows raised by the fact that representatives of private industry were there.
Some may say that scientists have no business collaborating with businessmen who are mainly concerned about money. But in fact, applied science and business have been going steady for ages.
Edwin Howard Armstrong, the inventor most responsible for modern radio, made most of his great discoveries in partnership with RCA, the Radio Corporation of America.
Collaboration among universities and with life science industry representatives, and - dare I say it - venture capitalists - is essential for our state’s economic future.
That is, it is essential, as a U of M announcement put it, “if Michigan is to speed promising stem cell discoveries from the laboratories down the path toward therapies for patients.”
Nobody realistically expects a short-term fix for our economic troubles. Michigan isn’t going to become the nation’s spinal cord store tomorrow. But it is quite possible that our major universities could nail down patents on some strong intellectual properties.
That alone would provide a seed bed. It’s nice to know that even now, as we struggle with the wreckage of the past, the future, in a few select laboratories around our state, is struggling to be born.
Nobody realistically expects a short-term fix for our economic troubles. Michigan isn’t going to become the nation’s spinal cord store tomorrow.
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Nobody realistically expects a short-term fix for our economic troubles. Michigan isn’t going to become the nation’s spinal cord store tomorrow.
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