Cis-platinum, I don't know who discovered it, but it was clearly going to work in the clinic with a combination of surgery and cis-platinum killed the tumor and 95% of the young men who had this tumor were cured and they still are, whereas it was the most common cause of death among young men anywhere, so only about 5% survived. It was amazing, a cure. In the meantime, in 1991, the same director had gone to a conference at Cold Spring Harbor and this is where I first heard about these fascinating pluripotent stem cells. There were some very, you could say elderly people there, Barry Pierce, who was doing this study in mouse. These are all the sort of legends of this field, and it's here in Cold Spring Harbor that that meeting took place. There were people like Rudolf Jaenisch there and Gail Martin and Lee Silvers – all these names of people who built this field.

Anyway, after cis-platinum cured human teratocarcinoma, I went on and did something else. I was interested in growth factors. I was interested in TGF-beta and we deleted TGF-beta or did a dominant negative receptor in mouse embryonic stem cells. I made chimeric mice with it and I'd been to Colin Stewart's lab when he was at the MBL to learn how to do that.

Dr. Christine Mummery is a professor of developmental biology at Leiden University and head of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology at the Leiden University Medical Center. Her work specializes in stem cell biology, cardiovascular development, and developmental biology.

In 1974, she received her Bachelor of Science degree in physics, electronics, and mathematics from the University of Nottingham, UK and in 1978 received her PhD in biophysics from the University of London, UK for her research at King’s College London. She received a post-doctoral fellowship at the Royal Society, UK from 1978 to 1980, and in 1981 continued her fellowship at the Hubrecht Institute working with carcinoma cells. In 1985, she was appointed to a tenured staff scientist working on developmental biology and differentiation.

In 2011, Dr. Mummery founded the iPSC&OoC Hotel facility in the Leiden University Medical Center. From 2009 to 20019, she was the head of the department of Anatomy and Embryology at Leiden University and guest professor at the University of Twente from 2015 to 2023. She was president of the ISSCR from 2020 to 2021 and is the founding editor of its journal, Stem Cell Reports.

Dr. Mummery has received several awards for her work in developmental biology, including the 2014 Hugo van de Poelgeest Prize for Animal Alternatives, the 2014 Hans Biomendaal Medal for innovative interdisciplinary research, being an elected member of the Academia Europaea in 2015 and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010, the 2021 Fondation Lefoulon Delalande-Institut de France prize for cardiovascular physiology, and the ISSCR Public Service Award in 2023.