The University of British Columbia (UBC) was established in 1899 as Vancouver College but [Page 1184]was taken over by McGill University in 1906. Two years later, the institution assumed the name it still bears. By 2014, UBC’s student body had grown to 37,000 graduate students and 10,000 undergraduates.

A second campus was opened at Kelowna in the Okanagen Valley in 2005, with another 7,600 undergraduates and 640 graduates being educated there. UBC devotes considerable resources to stem cell research, which is concentrated in six areas within the Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences and in Stem Cells and Gene Therapy within the Department of Medical Genetics in the medical school. Other stem cell researchers are located in Ophthalmology and Surgery within the medical school and in ...