As reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature, Vladimir Mironov, a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, was sent on a paid vacation by the University's leadership on February 11 for an indefinite period
The official formulation of the exclusion from research is vague - "for a number of reasons", but the main reason is considered to be his conflict with a colleague and careless handling of the computer.
Vladimir Mironov is a very famous person in the United States. The main direction of his research is the engineering of tissues and organs, that is, the creation of devices that, in the long term, will be able to grow such human organs as the kidneys and liver.
Mironov's laboratory is part of a team working under a $ 20 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). However, Mironov has long been complaining about the lack of funding for his laboratory, and they argue that on February 7-8, a conflict with his colleague Scott Little occurred precisely over this issue. In the evening, Mironov wrote a rather harsh letter to his opponent, but, sending it, "by mistake" pressed the "answer all" button, as a result of which it was sent to more than a hundred people. Little claims that the conflict did not occur because of the grant, but prefers not to disclose the essence of the dispute. The University administration also remains silent and assures journalists that the incident will not affect the fate of the 20 millionth project.
Most of all, it will affect another and, perhaps, the main object of Mironov's scientific interests, a topic that can roughly be called "growing meat in a test tube." By coincidence, just before the incident, the Western media wrote quite a lot about this side of his research, because, according to Mironov, he developed a "bioreactor" capable of producing as many meat products from several animal cells as desired. Artificial meat, says Mironov, can be given any desired taste, any composition and any structure. This part of the research in his laboratory is indeed rather poorly funded, although its successful completion in the future could give rise to a new market with a capacity of many billions of dollars. In his interviews, Mironov painted futuristic paintings,where powerful bioreactors supply food to overcrowded cities … Now the situation has gone from futuristic to surreal, he says.
“They see me as unstable,” he says. - "My research is blocked."
Mironov is sure that he will soon be fired, and his laboratory will never reopen.
