Michael West
CEO of BioTime, Inc.
Michael West is Chief Executive Officer of BioTime, Inc., a company based in Emeryville, California engaged in the research and development of aqueous-based synthetic solutions that may be used as plasma expanders, organ preservation solutions, or solutions to replace blood volume during low temperature surgery.
Formerly Dr. West served as President and Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology and as an Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He has extensive academic and business experience in age-related degenerative diseases, telomerase molecular biology and human embryonic stem cell research and development.
He also founded Geron Corporation of Menlo Park, California (NASDAQ: GERN) and from 1990 to 1998 he was a Director and Vice President, where he initiated and managed programs in telomerase diagnostics, oligonucleotide-based telomerase inhibition as anti-tumor therapy, and the cloning and use of telomerase in telomerase-mediated therapy wherein telomerase is utilized to immortalize human cells. From 1995 to 1998 he organized and managed the research between Geron and its academic collaborators James Thomson and John Gearhart that led to the first isolation of human embryonic stem and human embryonic germ cells.
His book The Immortal Cell: One Scientist's Quest to Solve the Mystery of Human Aging offers not only a chronology of the emerging science of immortality, but a personal journal of his own path from strict creationist to ardent scientist seeking to shape human evolution. It was West and his cohorts who announced in 2001 that by inserting a person's own DNA into an unfertilized egg cell from a woman of reproductive age, they could create embryonic stem cells that might be able to repair any number of problems for the DNA donor.
Dr. West presented at the inaugural SENS conference at Queens' College, Cambridge and at the 7th Alcor Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona on the prospects of regenerative medicine. At the free symposium organized by the Methuselah Foundation called "Aging: The Disease, The Cure, The Implications" he gave a presentation called "The International Embryome Initiative."
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The International Embryome Initiative
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Aging: The Disease, The Cure, The Implications
Understanding Aging: Biomedical and Bioengineering Approaches
Living Forever: The Longevity Revolution
transcript
Aging: The Disease, The Cure, The Implications.
The International Embryome Initiative
7th Alcor Conference,
The Prospect of Regenerative Medicine
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11.04 Long Now Foundation,
The Prospects of Human Life Extension 1:24:10