Ralph E. Dittman

Reflections on the Past Forty Years

2009 seemed like a long way off when we graduated from Harvard in 1969. Now in 2009, on the other side of the Tiber, 1969 was just yesterday. I left Harvard optimistic about humanity's fate. I retain that optimism, and I give thanks every day for having been blessed with a truly wonderful life, one in which I feel like I've accomplished my destiny - helping other people.

No, nothing like the pedal-to-the-metal altruism of my deceased father-in-law, wildcatter Roy Huffington, who literally touched millions of other lives, but a constant, steady, respectable rate of help accomplished primarily by having practiced medicine from 1969 (counting med school) to 1999 when I was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease.

Not being allowed to do surgery after that, I retreated for a year, then - having met Bill Brinkley, Ph.D., and Dean of the Graduate School at Baylor College of Medicine, my alma mater - I was reintroduced to the world of lab science. I traded my surgical hands for lab hands. It was just yesterday that Dr. DeBakey grabbed my hands and held them up in the air as he addressed our first year surgery residency group and said, "Doctors, the difference between these hands (he shook my hands) and these hands (he dropped my hands to hold up his own statuesque hands and shake them in my face) are that these hands (he shook his own hands again) are connected to a brain!"

With my new lab hands and a quick course in writing IRB documents from my new mentor, Bill Brinkley, I headed up a group that attempted to accomplish human Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer for the purpose of producing stem cells. The team included Bob Lanza and Young Chung of ACT, Randy Dunn and Alfred Wun of Houston OBG, myself (Stem Cell Source, LLC), an "off the campus" lab privately funded, five lab technicians and three nurses. We worked over a three-year period, went through approximately 300 cycled human eggs and got within a compacted morula (one day away) of the mystical SCNT blastocyst on four occasions...but no brass ring.

With the advent of the creation of human iPS cells, we have abandoned human SCNT as a means for producing patient-specific stem cells. I maintain my position as visiting professor with BCM, but am actively committed to working with a biotech company in Aurora, Colorado who has just invented a gutless viral vector and a method of gene insertion that could potentially solve some major problems allowing the application of gene therapy to exact cures of CF, Parkinson's, Diabetes, and more.

On all other fronts, I have been active in the usual ways - a member of several boards and commissions. I have been blessed with a perfect soul mate and life-long best friend, my wife Terry Huffington, and am emerging from the teenage-hood of both my daughters still on speaking terms.

Over the years, I've written a steady stream of journal articles, both professional and lay, as well as six novels, five screenplays, and a biography.