Monday Morning 8 am -- introduction time

Bernie Siegel gets up to welcome the crowd; (it's a giant room slowly filling up with people, not great for people in manual chairs, btw. It's carpeted. This isn't really a gathering of people in chairs, though. Almost everybody here seems to be a professional of one kind or another.)

Themes

Unite the community
Bench to bedside
Get to first clinical trials for hESc
How to get funding
Stakeholders may not realize that a lot of the funding is not top-down, it's the result of grassroots advocacy

People on the street say they support hESc because they believe they'll need it eventually if not right away.

There are 50 exhibitors here, he says they've travelled very far to get here.

Introduces the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, a woman whose name I did not catch . . . she starts by saying thanks to Bernie for what he's done on behalf of hESc research . .

Some basic stuff about U Madison:
A public university with a long history of cutting edge research, has 42,000 students, diverse group . . .

This is the 10th anniversary (in Nov, actually) of Jamie Thomson's isolation of human embryonic stem cells; last year he followed up with

There is a stem cell research archive project ongoing at U Madison, (good news for me)

Stem cell research is big on this campus; students are holding their own conference concurrent with this one.

They had a good turnout for the Lab on the Lake yesterday . . . 600 people


Tim Kamp gets up to offer his own welcome. Says thanks to the faculty from UW Madison who've put this together.

He says we need to roll up our sleeves and move this conversation forward, maybe talk with people we normally might not; develop new networks, etc. Introduces Clive Svendsen, who has a British accent . . . more thank yous, and then back to Bernie Siegel, who invites us to have a look at the program book so we can figure out where we want to be.


The general layout of the day, but I'll spare you that, because you're going to be reading it as it unfolds.