Month: March 2014

Harvard’s Role in STAP Cell Debacle

STAP-STEM-300x261

What is Harvard’s role in the STAP cell mess? If you have been living in a cave somewhere for the last 6 weeks, to catch you up to speed, an international collaborative team published two papers in Nature reporting the creation of powerful stem cells–so-called STAP stem cells–via a simple method of stressing ordinary differentiated …

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Week 5 STAP cell poll: still largely skeptical readership

STAP-5-poll

Update: A commenter said they’d prefer a different format to the graphing of these STAP cell poll results. Even though they weren’t exactly nice about it to put it mildly, I thought they had a good point so a hat tip to them and below is an attempt at a new graph style that makes …

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RIKEN Initial PR Reaction to STAP Cell Fiasco

STAP-stem-cells

The controversial STAP stem cell papers published in Nature had authors both from RIKEN in Japan and Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard. What is the RIKEN interim take on the STAP cell situation? We’ve had pretty much silence from Harvard itself on this matter publicly. Dr. Charles Vacanti, senior author on one of the STAP papers, …

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Great News: Senators Boxer & Kirk Introduce Regen Med Bill

I just heard some very good news on the regenerative medicine front. US Senators Barbara Boxer and Mark Kirk today introduced The Regenerative Medicine Promotion Act, which would keep track of and promote regenerative medicine efforts. This is really exciting and provides hope. One of the neat things about this news is that Boxer is …

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Seismologist from Japan looks at the STAP cells mess

Robert-J.-Geller

I’m a seismologist at the University of Tokyo, where I’ve been since 1984. I was the first tenured foreign faculty member in the history of our university. If you look at my publication list on the Researcher ID site you can see that my main research recent interests are modeling seismic wave propagation and analyzing …

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CRISPR Cas9 Gene Editing Tech Will Revolutionize Biology

Why is CRISPR Cas9 gene editing such a big deal? Imagine being able to make mutations in any gene you wanted say in stem cells in a relatively simple, quick and affordable fashion? Sounds exciting, huh? Every so often a new kind of technology comes along in the biomedical sciences that is a true game …

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STAP coverage ruffles some ‘elite’ stem cell feathers

Will a few of the “elite” of the research world be on the wrong side of history when it comes to STAP cells? It seems some don’t want people talking about just how bad the STAP situation might be. Bad news may travel fast as the expression goes, but the people who talk about it may …

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Beginning of End for STAP Cell Story? Possible Outcomes

The_End_Book

A host of problems have emerged related to the two Nature papers on STAP cells and other publications by some of the same authors. It’s only been just shy of 6 weeks since these papers came out, but doesn’t it feel like about 5 years? Where will this all end? (update in 2020: closer to …

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