Professor Evan Yale Snyder is the director of the Stem Cell Program at the Burnham Institute in San Diego. He completed his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania and finished his doctorate at the same university in 1981, his thesis being “Nutritional Requirements of Nerve Cells in Culture: The Pivotal Role of Insulin in a Serum-Free Medium for Embryonic Chick Dorsal Root Ganglia Neurons.” He then completed his residencies in pediatrics and neurology at the Children’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, and accepted a postdoctoral position at Harvard Medical School, working in pediatrics. However, he rapidly became interested in regenerative medicine, and in particular in the study of specialized neural stem cells in the human brain. This led him to concentrate on neurology and related disciplines.
In 1992, Snyder took up a position as instructor in neurology at the Harvard Medical School, and four years later was promoted to assistant professor. It was in 1998 that Snyder became well known outside the medical community. This took place when he was the first to announce that he had isolated neural stem cells from a single sample of human fetal tissue and had then grown them in culture before implanting them in the brains of mice. This procedure—never carried out successfully before—meant that it was possible for transplanted cells to respond to normal cues in the animal’s brain. The fact that they were able to replace diseased brain cells and bring in new genes was of major importance. Since then, Snyder has managed to successfully transplant human neural stem cells into the brains of primates.
The breakthroughs in medical science made by Snyder have allowed him and others to use neural and other stem cells to work on the replacement of tissue in humans to deal with a variety of diseases including heart disease, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and Lou Gehrig’s disease, as well as possible cures and treatments for multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and aspects of cancer and for injuries sustained to the brain and spinal cord. The focus of Snyder’s subsequent research has been on using stem cells as the master cells for regeneration in particular organs. In a newspaper interview, he likened the work to a procedure to reseed an old or damaged lawn with new grass. However, he recognized the ethical problems that arose from the use of stem cells derived from embryos, as well as the obvious logistical problems.
In 2001, after 22 years at Harvard, Snyder left that university for the Burnham Institute, La Jolla, California, as professor and director of the Stem Cells and Regeneration Program. He expressed some frustration at Harvard’s being hesitant to embrace the possibilities that arose from embryonic stem cell research and related fields, feeling that they were being conservative in their expenditure and unwilling to take risks with new disciplines. This had meant that he was one of only a small number of biologists working on stem cells at Harvard. At the Burnham Institute, which Snyder joined on December 1, 2002, he established a new Stem Cell and Regeneration Program. Commenting on his move there, Sny-der stated that he felt that the study of stem cell biology would, he expected, help with developmental biology and assist many adults to recover from debilitating injuries. As a result, he wanted to devote his attention to working out cures and treatments, some of which had already been tested in animals, and to transfer this knowledge to human applications.
As he pointed out, “Stem cells offer an intriguing mix of controversy, discovery, and hope.” Accepting the controversial nature of the research, as far as politicians and many others were concerned, Snyder argued that the potential for advances was so great that work on embryonic stem cells should not be neglected because of its huge therapeutic potential. In 2003, Snyder, in conjunction with two other researchers, Tanja Zigova and Paul R. Sanberg, edited Neural Stem Cells for Brain Repair and Spinal Cord Repair (Humana, 2003).
