According to the international ranking service, Leiden Ranking, the USA comes out on top for high impact science. Out of their top Leiden Ranked 25 universities ranked by the percentage of papers in the top 10% of their respective fields for science overall, the USA had 22 of the top spots. MIT ranked first and …
Leiden Ranking: USA does great science, but does not play well with others Read More »
I’ll be holding a live web chat here tomorrow, Tuesday April 23, at 1PM PDT. I’ll do my best to answer your questions. I’m trying out a new chat application on WordPress so fingers crossed it works! It’s a bit of an experiment. I believe you will also be able to chat with each other.
I’ve written in the past (see here, here, and parody here on HuffPost) about how stem cell sports medicine is a dangerous thing. It continues to grow in popularity. There’s a new piece out now saying that Ultimate Fight Championship President Dana White went on a stem cell tourism trip to Germany for a treatment …
Snake oil stem cell sports medicine: A-Rod, Kobe, Dana White Read More »
When are iPS cell-based therapies ready to be tested in actual people? It’s the million or perhaps even billion dollar question of today in the stem cell field. I realize that perhaps it is also a dangerous question, politically-speaking, for me to ask in a public forum, but patient lives as well as potentially the …
Back-to-back papers (here and here) in Nature Biotechnology report the transdifferentiation (now often simply referred to as “direct reprogramming”) of plain old fibroblasts into brain cells called oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs). OPCs are a remarkably useful kind of brain cell that generates myelin, which insulates nerves. OPCs are thought to have great therapeutic potential for …
In my series eight simple reasons to pause before getting an unlicensed treatment from a non-compliant clinic I have covered the first five: (1) potential loss of insurance coverage for negative outcomes that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, (2) failure of patient follow up by the doctors and clinics, (3) exclusion from future clinical trial participation, (4) undesired …
There is no doubt about it. The stem cell field has captured the imagination of people around the world of all occupations. Scientists themselves are captivated by stem cells. The number of articles on stem cells and the number of journals focused on stem cells are going way up. What about impact? Are all of …
Stem cell journal impact factors: how does your favorite stack up? Read More »
A relatively newly recognized, important player in the stem cell field is a molecule called histone H3.3. Histones are key components of chromatin with integral roles in regulating almost all aspects of cell behavior through orchestrating functions such as transcription and chromosome segregation. Histone H3.3 knockout My lab has just (April 9) published new studies …
Histone H3.3: giving cells epigenetic flexibility Read More »
The ISSCR Annual Meeting will be held In Boston, MA in June. In advance of the meeting I was looking through the Preliminary Program that showed up in my mail box and then I checked out the confirmed speakers page on the web. What a cool lineup of speakers, I thought, but something seemed different….at …