Royal Society Stem Cell Meeting talks online

The Royal Society has uploaded audio files of almost all the talks of their Discussion Meeting last October: “2010: What Next for Stem Cell Biology?”.

Unfortunately there are no slides to look at (as far as I can tell) so some of the more technical talks may be hard to follow, but if you’re already familiar with the work of some of the speakers, hearing them speak may help put things in context, even without seeing the slides. The abstracts of the talks are all in the programme booklet, which you can download from their site as well.

I attended this meeting in person, and was impressed with both the variety of the talks as well as the overlap between them. If you’re trying to answer the RSc’s question posed in the meeting title, then the common thread of many of the talks suggests that what’s next for stem cell biology is mainly to get a complete picture of reprogramming. But the variety of the talks indicates that there are many ways to approach this: finding out how to make one particular cell type for therapeutic means (addressed by several speakers), finding out the mathematical concepts behind reprogramming to define a formal theory (Sui Huang’s talk), or even calculating the cost of reprogramming when setting up a company that relies on iPS cells for research (Cathy Prescott’s talk). There’s still a lot of work to be done, but hopefully the collective approaches will reveal a clear picture of reprogramming in the next few years.

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