He refuses to own a TV, doesn’t read newspapers, hates stories about himself and talksthisfast on the rare occasions he does speak to reporters. Jamie Thomson, Wisconsin’s stem cell pioneer, does not suffer fools lightly, so you’d better get to the point and avoid personal questions.

“I’m a very private person,” he warns.

Or at least he would like to be. This may be wishful thinking by a man seen as a possible Nobel Prize contender, who at age 39 made a discovery that landed him on the cover of Time magazine and prompted President Bush’s first national television address.

Thomson isolated human embryonic stem cells _ master cells that can morph into every part of the body. They are medically promising, but controversial because embryos are destroyed to get them.

Now he is in the news again, for finding a solution to that problem. He and fellow scientists turned back the biological clock on old cells to make them young again, giving a way to create customized stem cells for anyone who needs them without using eggs or embryos.

“Any basic microbiology lab can now do it, and it’s cheap and quick,” he said.

Now 48 and still at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Thomson is a thinker as much as a tinkerer. Deeply philosophical, he often is the first to spot ethical and societal implications in the science.

Early in the stem cell debate, he posed a theoretical dilemma to illustrate how tricky it can be to determine the moral status of various types of cells. If a lab were on fire and a baby sat next to a tank holding dozens of frozen embryos and you could save only one, which would you choose, he asked an audience.

Those who believe that each embryo is a human life deserving absolute protection might choose the tank, based on the number of lives at stake, he contended. Thomson said he would choose the child, because the stage of development makes a difference in the moral value he would assign.

Thomson grew up in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, earned a biophysics degree from the University of Illinois, then went to veterinary school at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a doctorate in molecular biology.

He moved to Madison in 1991 and became chief pathologist at the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center in 1995, the year he isolated embryonic stem cells from a primate and established the technique he used for human embryos three years later.

He won’t like us telling you this: His wife is a scientist; they have three children.

He drives: “Why do people care?” OK, he concedes, “we have a Subaru wagon that’s beat up, that the kids have been scribbling on for years.”

He watches: Netflix _ “what you want when you want it” _ on a nice computer monitor.

For fun: He used to hang glide, now backpacks and canoes.

Other hobbies? “Not that I want to talk about.”

No surprise.