Dr. Michael D. West is the Chairman of the Board, the Chief Scientific Officer, and former CEO of Advanced Cell Technology Corporation, which specializes in Stem Cell research. Dr. West was the founder of Geron Corporation and served as its Director and Senior Executive Officer from 1990 to 1998. Dr. West's 2003 book The Immortal Cell (ISBN 0385509286) tells his personal story of his religious, business and scientific struggles to deal with the problem of human aging.

He was the first person to clone human embryos and grow them to the six-cell stage.

Quotes

• "Ultimately, the dream of biologists is to have the sequence of DNA, the programming code of life, and to be able to edit it the way you can a document on a word processor." ("On Living Forever," interview with Michael West, Ubiquity magazine, wwww.megafoundation.org, June 2000.)

• "I could take a Y chromosome from Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Chromosome X from Bob Barker, a Chromosome 6 from Robin Cook, and so on, and assemble a human being with 46 parents, all male for that matter - a child with 46 fathers and no mother." (sic 1)

• "All I think about, all day long, every day, is human mortality and our own aging." (Stephen Hll, "The Recycled Generation," New York Times Magazine, Jan. 30, 2000)

• "In a though experiment, we can imagine making body components one-by-one, each made young by cloning. Then our body would be made young again segmentally, like an antique car is restored by exchanging failing components... I can take a cell from a 100-year-old person and make a brand-spanking-new dimpled babe - doesn't that in itself tell us something about the immortal substratum of life?" (sic 1)

See also

• Gerontology

External links

• Dr. West's Biography
• Advanced Cell Technology
• Who Is Who in Gerontology
• The Prospects of Human Life Extension recorded November 2004 at the Long Now Foundation

Biogerontologists | Chief executives | Living people