Face to Watch

Tom Okarma '68 sees a day when Parkinson's disease won't be disabling and diabetes could be cured without insulin injections. In his field of regenerative medicine, researchers believe stem cells—the embryonic cells that mature to form any tissue in the body—hold profound hope for curing everything from heart failure to osteoporosis. As CEO of Menlo Park, Californiabased Geron Corp., Okarma is at the epicenter of stem cell research in the United States. Geron holds most of the critical patents in the field, including the cloning technology that produced Dolly the sheep, another technology that keeps cells young and other methods to produce stem cells in the laboratory. The key is Geron's patent on a technology that makes a cell immortal, allowing the company to reproduce the same line of stem cells indefinitely. "We have the ability to produce these cells in very large lot sizes, which makes it cost efficient," says Okarma. "For me, vision, inventiveness and discovery in medicine must be tempered by cost-effectiveness."