Month: May 2014

TGIF stem cell headlines of week: Asterias, lasers, immunity, & more

Laser-tooth-stem-cells

It’s been an important week for stem cells. Although I’ve been busy working on multiple grants and papers, when I take a break I like to read up on what’s been going on with stem cells. What are the top stem cell stories and headlines of the week? CIRM awarded Asterias (a subsidiary of BioTime) …

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Obokata OKs Retraction of Nature STAP Cell Letter, Not Article

Obokata-press-conference

Japanese news media are reporting that Haruko Obokata and other key authors have agreed to retract the Nature STAP cell letter, but not the Nature article. This is a major development and a peculiar one because to many in the  field it is the Nature STAP cell article that is the more flawed of the two Nature papers on STAP. Why would …

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Past Time for Nature to Retract STAP Cell Pubs, Open up on Review Problems

natures-misstap

Two stem cell papers riddled with errors, with figures that resulted from potential misconduct, with plagiarism, and with other serious problems remain uncorrected and unretracted in the prestigious journal Nature. It is well past time for the journal to editorially retract them. It was about four months ago that Nature published the two astonishing STAP papers reporting the …

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Caplan Article on Bogus Stem Cell Research: Some Different Views

When bioethicist Arthur Caplan talks about stem cells, people pay close attention and for good reason. Caplan has provided important perspectives on the stem cell field over the years. For example, you can see a guest post on this blog here about human cloning. However, in my post today I respectfully discuss how I disagree with several parts of this week’s piece by …

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Cool, encouraging new preclinical study on monkey iPS cells

monkey-iPSC-tumors

What happens if we start using induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells clinically in humans? A cool new paper recently came out that gets us closer to being able to predict an answer. It’s an important question as iPS cell-derived cellular products are getting closer to clinical use. For example, the first iPS cell-based clinical trial …

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What are important, recent stem cell good news stories?

Jeanne-Loring

Sometimes there is so much craziness and outright bad stuff going on out there around the world related to stem cells that we can lose sight of all the good news and encouraging developments as well. I think the new paper (Chen, et al.) from a team led by Drs. Lane and Loring is good news. …

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Will Speedy A4M Stem Cell Course for Docs Put Patients at Risk?

A4M-logo

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and more specifically I say that a little stem cell training for MDs, such as from A4M, can potentially be a dangerous problem too. I’ve been very concerned about self-proclaimed “stem cell training courses” for MDs. These kinds of courses have claimed that over as short as a …

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Does Europe Know Something About STAP Cells That We Don’t? Latest Poll Results

STAP-poll-9

For more than 3 months I’ve been doing a tracking poll on the sentiments of the readers of this blog about STAP stem cells. The question is “Do you believe in STAP Stem Cells?” The result are summarized in the graph above. The latest poll results from period #9 are somewhat of a surprise. The …

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