Biography | Shinya Yamanaka — The Hospital Campus That Answered When the Other Labs Did Not

In 1993 the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease did not yet occupy Mission Bay. Its labs sat in and around San Francisco General Hospital at 1001 Potrero Avenue. Yamanaka had finished a pharmacology Ph.D. at Osaka City University that March. He wanted mouse genetics and applied widely to American laboratories. Almost none answered. Thomas Innerarity at Gladstone did. Yamanaka arrived as a postdoctoral fellow in April 1993 and stayed through 1996, later as a staff research investigator. The work then was lipid metabolism and knockout mice, not cellular reprogramming. The Mission Bay building at 1650 Owens Street opened in 2004, after he had already gone home to Osaka. He returned to Gladstone as a senior investigator in 2007, on that newer campus. A pin at Owens Street would describe a later chapter. This pin is the hospital ground where the first American yes arrived. The current hospital campus is now Zuckerberg San Francisco General. The older Gladstone rooms around it are gone. Living-person rule: the public campus and the published years only. No home and no daily routine. Photo: HaeB, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: National Institutes of Health, public domain.