STANFORD-- CALIF—Irving Weissman is a risk taker. He doesn’t mind losing bets: A bottle of wine here, a beer there. It’s a small price to pay for the progress of science.
The last bet the Stanford University immunologist lost was with postdoc Mike McCune over whether a complete human immune system could be transplanted into a mouse. “I said, ‘Great idea, fantastic, but I’ll bet it doesn’t work,’ “ Weissman recalls. “Well, I was wrong and he was right.”
It’s been a good year for the Weissman lab. The September 23 publication in Science (page 1632) of their paper describing mice with a human immune system—the first true animal model for studying AIDS—came on the heels of another long-sought breakthrough: the isolation from mice of stem cells, the precursors that give rise to the entire immune system. If the isolation procedure can be repeated in humans, it could revolutionize bone ...
