Vol. 161, Issue 3 | Feb. 24– Mar. 8, 2016 | City College of San Francisco | Since 1935 | FREE
From Dark Past, City College Student Looks To Brighter Future By Nancy Chan nchan@theguardsman.com
Nick Lindley, 24, wakes up to a panic attack every morning at 7 a.m. His body does this without an alarm clock or an actual cause for alarm. Then he walks with his dog Ziggy to the Bay Area Addiction Research and Treatment (BAART) clinic on Turk Street. There, he drinks 81 milligrams of methadone. “They’re great,” Lindley said, who holds the clinic in high regard. “They raise or lower the amount if I ask. I’ve tried lower doses but things get weird at school if I take less.” With Ziggy in tow, Lindley ties back his blonde hair and sweats through a threadbare band T-shirt as the BART train takes him toward his 9 a.m. class. Lindley carries a toolkit slung over his back that holds a City College Rams City College Student continues on page 4
City College student Nick Lindley and his service dog Ziggy commute to the Ocean Campus from the BAART clinic on Turk St. on Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2016. (Photo by Gabriella Angotti-Jones/The Guardsman)
Stem Cell Internship Open to City College Students extremely popular,” Chief Communications Officer Don Gibbons of CIRM said. “It’s considered a triumph for students, patients and the emerging biotech industry.”
CIRM’s Mission
Rosa Canchari works with cell cultures in City College’s biotech laboratory on February 22, 2016. Canchari is taking intro into cellular research (Biotech 21 A). (Photo by Amanda Aceves/Special to The Guardsman)
By Andy Bays abays@theguardsman.com
In the basement of Science Hall at Ocean Campus, in the former welding facility, City College students are learning to grow stem cells that may potentially cure diseases such as Alzheimer’s, stroke, Parkinson’s, heart
disease and diabetes. “Those little stringy things are stem cells,” Dr. Carin Zimmerman said, pointing towards one of the many microscopes in use. She is the coordinator of the Bridges Program at City College, an internship for students who have earned a Stem Cell Technology certificate. “Some are stem cells
from hamsters and some are mice,” Zimmerman said. “The students learn how to grow the cells.” The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), steward of a $3 billion bond measure (Proposition 71), allows students to get hands-on experience working in laboratories and with patients suffering from diseases.
CIRM awarded City College over $2 million for the continuation of its five-year Bridges Program, which began at City College in 2010. In addition to getting career experience, interns are given a monthly stipend of $2,700 to use for rent and other expenses while conducting their research. “The internship is
California Proposition 71 passed in 2004 in response to the Bush Administration’s refusal to fund stem cell research. In 2006, the state began funding “all areas of stem cell research that show promise to accelerating treatments to patients in need,” the CIRM website states. “The underlying goal of the Bridges Program is to take students who might not have thought about a career in stem-cell technology and show them their options,” Gibbons said. “There’s no shortage of PhDs, but there is a huge lack of stem cell technicians.” City College has received $2,704,836 from CIRM since 2010, which has funded 10 interns per year for five years. Interns are expected to work 40 hours per week in a laboratory. A large percentage of the grant goes towards buying equipment like anti-contamination cabinets, incubators and
large amounts of sterile plastic supplies made for one-time use. The new CIRM grant of $2,163,500 has been assigned to cover the program’s expenses between 2017 and 2022. Beginning 2017, the number of interns accepted into the program will decrease from 10 to eight to improve the education of each student.
New direction
With the scheduled grant, the Bridges Program is aligning itself with the new direction in which stem cell research is heading. “The first part of the Prop 71 money pretty much all went into basic research. Scientists just wanted to find out why things worked or how things worked,” Zimmerman said. “Now we’re moving into what we call ‘translational,’ which is the idea that we’re translating from understanding how something works to using that knowledge to design a therapy or a cure to a particular disease,” Zimmerman said. “So now, (CIRM) wants the Stem Cell continues on page 2