Martin Kace Interview.

Martin Kace is President of Empax, a non-profit design studio that focuses its efforts on issues of significant concern and influence. He is former CEO of Joe Boxer and Phat Farm. Martin and I discussed his latest initiative, the 9th Floor Project, which is developing a common identity for supporters of embryonic stem cell research.

What has motivated you to pursue this project?

The primary motivation is personal.

A little over 5 years ago I was up at my country house, we have some wooded land around it, a fellow was paring down some trees, mostly deadwood and parasitic sapplings. In this case he was cutting down a live tree. I was watching him do it, and he cut it in such a way that the tree struck me in the spine and the cranium. I was in a coma for a month, and it took a while to reassemble my personality and to really understand what had happened to me.

I had the usual…I don’t know if i can call it usual, but most people go about things this way…most people are angry for a while, and I was an angry person for a while. I was fairly well along my way of coming to terms with it when the [U.S.] President made his announcement about embryonic stem cell research and its future, in terms of the federal government.

What specifically was that announcement?

What he rendered was, what must have been in his own mind, a Solomonic decision. In the story of King Solomon two women that come to him claiming the same baby is their own. King Solomon said, “alright, want to split the baby in two? We’ll give half to you and half to you.” And of the women stepped forward and said, “don’t do that, give the baby to her.” And he knew the woman that said that was the mother.

A Solomonic decision, that’s usually associated with great wisdom, but in the case of stem cells, Bush’s Solomonic descision actually did split the baby in half. What it did is say, we’ve got 66 researchable stem cell lines in existence, we’re not going to allow any more to be created, and we’re going to limit ourselves to research on those 66. There are all kinds of technical problems with most of the 66 to begin with.

Once I got to understand what 66 stem cell lines meant, I was absolutely infuriated, because it was clear in short order, that this doesn’t take the research very far at all.

It had a profound affect on you.

I had never really felt a sense of mission in my life, but this just hit me like a ton of bricks. I had to do something. I was probably the perfect storm in that sort of way. My whole adult life having really regretted that I hadn’t committed myself to anything outside of business or what I was particularly working on.

This was it.

So that’s where this all got started.

What exactly is the 9th Floor Project and how is it addressing this?

The 9th Floor Project was established in order to come up with an icon that would promote embryonic stem cell research more accurately and as a way for supporters to be able to identify themselves. Supporters of embryonic stem cell research come from all kinds of places and all kinds of causes, by and large disease/disorder related, but the disparate groups have a hard time really getting together.

They have a central website but there isn’t a central message. It is mostly links to the individual organizations. It’s really important, especially in an election cycle, to enable a large mass of people who support this idea to merge in some fashion.

The logo is intended to represent each of these different groups and their reasons for supporting under one banner. Is the 9th Floor Project helping to unify the verbal message as well?

One tends to leak into the other uncontrollably. That is not to say that we are consciously working on the verbal message. When you you come up with a brand, if you do that work right, you get to such a degree of depth about that issue, that you really find yourself adopting it’s language. And it is, in a way—a relatively painless way—a way to learn a new language.

You’re telling the story as the icon develops. What is the purpose of opening up the process and how do you hope the project will benefit from that?

This has been an attempt to open the project to the design, PR, and media (in the loose sense of the term) communities and to illicit participation from their side as well as commentary on what those communities think we’re doing right and what they think we’re doing wrong.

Do you believe by opening this process that the communities you’re representing will be more committied or more likely to adopt the icon?

Becuase they’ve been consulted. One would hope, yes. Although, the big caveat here is that, when we open it up to the patient community, you do get exposed to everyone being a designer. That’s something I believe we have enough maturity and experience to deal with.

You present some short video clips on the site, showing a demonstration in Washington, D.C.. That’s happening there?

What I organized back at that time was a response to an edict of Bush’s. I was injured in November 2000. Bush’s Veto was August in 2001. In April 2002, I organized 5 other paraplegics, had a scaffold built in Washington framing the capital building. And the 6 of us hung ourselves, as a visual representation of what we felt was done to us.

And that eventually led to the 9th Floor Project?

Here’s the thing, I got to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a PR firm in Washington. To get some attention for this event. They professed to be very much behind it. In the end there was one reporter from medical magazine and all she wanted to know about was how the act of hanging was, physically, for a paraplegic. So there was nothing there.

This time around, with the 9th Floor Project, we’ve learned quite a bit. And I’m certainly not funding any more all by myself. So now we’re in a precarious position of having to put together a fund-raising package and going out to the world. We have to raise funds in the next two weeks, at least $300,000 in the next two weeks or else the whole thing is no-go. In which case we will continue as the 9th Floor Project.

The name we gave to the 527, to the political action group, is Stem Cell Majority. Which, from my own parlance and the parlance of Empax, is a little watered down for my own personal style. We’ve got two DC partners here and they feel that that is what’s going to speak to the public. I have to say that I was very heartened by the fact that they really liked this 45 second video we made about the destruction of an embryo. We made it for the 9th Floor Project site with the hopes of it going viral. They’re very excited about it.

I think it speaks volumes.

Can you describe what’s happening in that video?

In the hanging video, I attempted to humanize the effect of the ban. Whereas in the ebmryo destruction video, it’s more “look what you’re doing.” Politicians have referred to these as embryos “that would otherwise be destroyed.” There are 400,000-500,000 embryos around the country in deep freezers right now. And politicians have been talking about these embryos otherwise being destroyed. The fact of the matter is, that besides these 500,000, at least 350,000 are destroyed every year. So it’s not an otherwise story. This is what goes on.

There was a survey of in vitro fertilization clinics around the country, 217 responded. They were asked questions about how they treated embryos when they were no longer used. Four out of 217 bury them. Another 4 have a quasi ceremony before they trash them. And everybody else trashes them. That’s what happens and that’s what’s been going on.

And that’s what would continue under the current administration’s policy?

Absolutely, or maybe then the government will mandate freezing all of them. But that’s nonsense because after 3 years they’re useless. Between 2 and 3 years. They’re not viable anymore. Keep them around in a freezer, what? to look good and spend money? I have a hard time seeing that.

The video shows this waste you describe—the discarded embryo—and ends with the phrase “choose life.“ Explain that choice.

We’re only using “choose life” in the 9th Floor Project context. It’s also what we’ve sent off to Stem Cell Majority; they are not that keen on it. But from my point of view, I thought of names like “the real stem cell majority” or “the real pro-life majority.”
Confronting it and confusing the issue is both tactically and strategically a very important move. But you find people very shy of doing things like that.

You’ve borrowed the anti-abortion language.

I wouldn’t call it borrowing; I’d call it armed robbery. And that’s just fine.

What we’re victims of right now, politically, is the patient community is victim of being proxy in the abortion rights. That’s really what this is about, in essence.

Can you explain what you mean by that?

Embryos and allowing therapies and research to be done on embryos and allowing therapies to be derived from them, for the anti-abortion movement. Is like giving the tip of the finger that eventually leads to the arm. Give them an embryo today and they’ll be aborting 7 month term fetuses tomorrow. So, that’s really where we’re stuck.

And their constituents are buying that message?

Very much so. Very much so. And the President is feeding it back to them. I’m not letting Tony Snow take back his words that the President considers using embryos to be murder. Bush himself said, “I will not permit the taking of the human life.” Well, what’s the taking of the human life if its not murder? That is what he believes.

A person unsympathetic or unaware of the cause, would still have a strong reaction to that. It is incredibly moving. For a person unclear of the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell research, can you briefly explain?

To the best of our knowledge at this stage of the development of science, stem cells are the building blocks of all higher life forms. Stem cells are undefined cells that exist in the very, very, very early stages of the embryo when it ranges in size from one or two cells up to 1256 or maybe a couple of powers higher than that, when the cells start to differentiate. There you get the distinction of this is turning into a bone, a finger, an ocular nerve, a spinal cord…any of those things. In the period before that differentiation occurs, these stem cells are what’s know as pluripotent, meaning they can turn into any part of the human body into which they are implanted. They become the same type of tissue as their host. And that is what’s so very important. It’s like the importance of the elements in chemistry. These are the elemental building blocks of higher life form biology.

What would an appropriately acknowledged and fairly regulated stem cell research policy enable?

Making research easier for private institutions that may receive federal funds for general work. Let me clarify that. If the Harvard Medical School is given research funds from the federal government, and they have (which they do now have) an embryonic stem cell research facility, they cannot use the same pencils, same pieces of paper, the same parking spaces, the same anything as those that recieve federal grants. So Harvard has been compelled to set up a brand new facility. Harvard has a way of attracting money. Not all facilities are that lucky. So it really does hamper the work.

Because they can’t share resources?

Right.

Then there’s the money side from the government, which would be enormously helpful if the government, or the administration really, decided to get behind this thing.

Third, stem cell research would have federal oversight. Regulation is one side of it, and it’s a good thing. The most important is that the government would be clearinghouse for research that’s going on privately and under state initiatives all over the country. This would be a godsend.

That’s to enable sharing of knowledge and information?

Exactly.

What is happening globally, that may ad other factors to this. Are research or healthcare benefits growing in other countries while the U.S. is moving slowly?

Look, a number of western countries and scientifically advanced eastern countries are moving ahead as quickly as they can. They have nothing like the resources we have in America to make this happen. So you get little bits and pieces of promise from different experiments and different labs, which of course have to be replicated, they have to go through the scientific literature, be critiqued, etcetera.

China, however, doesn’t have the same kind of compunctions about human trials as any of the other countires. And in fact have been conducting human trials and human therapies with embryonic stem cells for a little over 2 years now. The reporting has been very haphazzard. It’s really been anecdotal.

One of America’s great stem cell scientists, out of Rutgers, is now taking a sabatical, and will spend a year in China doing follow ups and helping the Chinese with protocols. China may get itself a nobel in science.

Do you think that trend will continue. That you’ll see researchers go other places?

There’s little doubt about that. Researchers are going to go where they can do that science. And where that science doesn’t have all kinds of ceilings imposed and regulations and prohibitive instructions to their scientific process.

What are the other market interests here that would encourage policy change?

There is a debate. I’ve heard a lot of discussions within the patient community about pharmaceutical companies an their approach. You have the sort of crude paranoia/conspiracity theory, where people believe the phar. companies may be behind Bush’s veto even. I think its in the phar. co. interest to support this. They’re not going to be dinged one bit. There’s going to be such a need for support medication, for interim therapies that involve phar. They’ll be better off if anything.

Do you see the end product, a product of this being a public display of this icon?

One thing we’re thinking with the Stem Cell Majoriy when we go public with the campaigns that we’re going to bird-dog. We have aplan for an action of 20-30 people with trashcans, at speaches of the anti-stem cell candidate, and for people to climb into them. And we can have a couple of people from the disabled community, from the MS or Parkinsons, due likewise, we can make an extremely strong visual statement that will get picked up by the local press. That’s really soemthing we’re really seeking.

Of course, at this stage, we’re really more interested in being a local story than we are in being a national story. Of course, if you make enough local stories, you become a national story.

Right now, throughout the United States, the mid-term primaries are approaching. Is there an opportunity to get other politicians on board with this early? Is this something they can campaign on? Something they can latch onto?

There are. There are a number of races where stem cell research is very much an issue. There are a number of them and I think we could also work to pump it up as an issue in all races as well. At the moment, with Lebanon with Iraq, with spring water bombs, we’re a little distracted from that right now. But I have to say even as early as today things have started to settle down in those areas a bit. We’re confident that in this election there will be a moment to get this going.

We’re in the throws of reaction. And that’s in the vast American majority’s mind, is not what we’re about. We’re about moving forward. We’re not about trying to stuff genies back in bottles.

What does a successful realization of this vision look like?

Ubiquitousness? Having sightings everytime you go out in the street. Or everytime you get in your car. Seeing it shown somewhere. You’re talking bumperstickers…but we’re thinking of lots of different things since we havn’t quite finalized it yet. We’re talking one interation was sizing down the trash bag so they can be used as totes for grocieries or whatever. And we could work them into some kind of pin or clip or hat, or different kinds of things. That would make it in effect an object of recycling.

This thing about actually creating an icon is something that’s not actually done that much. I would appeal to the public at large to come pouring into the 9th Floor Project website and give something in terms of ideas and stories and what this venture/adventure means to them.

Relevant Links:

• 9th Floor Project
• 9th Floor Project videos

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