This is at least the FOURTH story involving ACT th...

2006-08-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

This is at least the FOURTH story involving ACT that was wildly hyped. If the media refuse to learn not to trust that outfit, there isn't much more I can do. Thanks, Don.

Mouse: The Nature experiment might have been very little, or it might have been a double that ACT pretended was a grand slam home run. See my latest entry as to why. Thanks.

Wesley,Thanks for being an outstanding upstream ne...

2006-08-26T08:52:00.000-07:00

Wesley,

Thanks for being an outstanding upstream news and commentary provider.

Could you repost, proide a link to or update your previous comments on what this means to the credibility of the MSM medical reporters, the MSM itself, and the scientific community? I think that's a big story. I just told a reporter that this is the second story that's blown up in their faces in the last year or so.

I get the following qoute from a May, 2005 White P...

2006-08-26T01:44:00.000-07:00

I get the following qoute from a May, 2005 White Paper put out by The President's Council on Bioethics:

"The recent work of Strelchenko and colleagues with disaggregated 8-24-cell embryos suggests that whole human embryos as early as the 8-cell stage are potentially usable as a source of pluripotent stem cells.
This work would have to be reproduced and refined before we could be certain that embryos at such an early stage are indeed a dependable source of stem cells.
It would then have to be shown that stem cells can also be derived from
isolated blastomeres extracted from an 8-cell embryo.
It seems far from certain that enough cells can be extracted from the embryo to derive stem cells while also avoiding injury to the embryo."

This is a good statement of what was understood a year ago. The scientific challenge was to create a stem cell line from an isolated blastomere, simply because it was known that the removal of only one cell from an eight cell embryo would still leave that embryo viable. Thus if an isolated blastomere could produce a stem cell line you would then have both that line and a still viable life. This would be significant. This is what ACT claimed to have achieved. In fact, while they didn't use whole, disassociated embryos, they did use four to seven cells from an eight cell unit, which is pretty darn close to the same thing, it's uncertain that it differs meaningfully from Strelchenko's work, and the embryo is just as dead.

So, while I haven't read the paper in Nature, I'm unable to see that there was much scientific advance. The only thing new was the stunningly dishonest press release. And of course this is just exactly what you've said.

www.bioethics.gov/reports/white_paper/text.html White Paper, May 2005, The President's Council on Bioethics

Comments on Secondhand Smoke: Your 24/7 Seminar on Bioethics and the Importance of Being Human: "Science by Press Release"

This is at least the FOURTH story involving ACT th...

Wesley,Thanks for being an outstanding upstream ne...

I get the following qoute from a May, 2005 White P...