Well, I’ve been here for, I think altogether four meetings. Two of them have been in the Aging meetings and I say this to my students coming up, I told them this is the best meeting you’re going to come to and there’s a reason I think that. The first thing is these meetings are egalitarian meetings of the U.S. They are for the proletariat, I guess. I mean, everyone submits—there’s no preordained talk, you know. Everybody here is on the same level. Everybody has good science to talk about and there are opportunities to present it. So you submit your abstract and then the organizers make a decision based on what was submitted who’s going to speak, that’s one feature. The other feature that I love about this meeting is that people stay for it. You don’t have like the politician/scientist showing up, giving a talk and then leaving. And one of the reasons is because these meetings are designed to discourage “we” scientists from doing that by not telling us when we’re going to speak. This is a beautiful thing. And I think the other thing is that the environment here is just a very nice and cozy, is what it is. The facilities here are really excellent and I think they were designed—I don’t know, but my sense is they were designed with some thought given to what was going to take place in them. So Grace Auditorium is just a great place to give a talk. It’s just my favorite place to give a talk. Yeah, I think it’s been really thoughtfully designed.

James Sherley is a scientist on the forefront of adult stem-cell research. He earned his B.A. from Harvard University and his M.D./Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular and cellular biology (BCMB Program) from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

He was a Principal Investigator in the Division of Medical Science at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and is currently a Principal Investigator at the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Health at MIT. His present research is in integrated studies in somatic stem cell kinetics.

Sherley was honored as a Pew Scholar in Biomedical Science in 1993, and in 2001 became a Pew Science and Society Institute Fellow.