TGIF: NatGeo sell out, GM Humans, Wild West, Science backstabbing, & more

It’s a shame that National Geographic (NatGeo) has become part of a corporate empire that is not always consistent, to put it nicely, with data-based reality. Can NatGeo maintain its credibility and impact, when it is owned by a climate change denier (quoted for example as dissing folks as “extreme greenies”) who also has other very non-scientific priorities?

There’s been an increasing amount of discussion of the technology that could produce GM humans. This dialogue includes the new Hinxton Statement (my take on that here) and George Church’s quoted that Hinxton (which BTW did not call for a moratorium of any kind) was being too cautious nonetheless. Church is quoted:

“seems weak on addressing why we should single out genome editing relative to other medicines” that are potentially dangerous”

Should we push pause, stop, or fast-forward on human genetic modification? asks Lisa Ikemoto. Is there a rewind or edit button too? 

The NEJM published a new piece on stem cell clinics run amok and the lack of an effective FDA response. Sounds awfully familiar including the use of “Wild West” in the title, right? My gripe with these authors is that they didn’t give credit where credit is due to those of us on the front lines of this battle and in particular to social media-based efforts to promote evidence-based medicine in the stem cell arena. Still, their message was on target.

Are men more likely to commit large-scale scientific fraud? Check out RetractionWatch’s leaderboard. Of course the sheer number of retractions does not take into account the impact of any one or two given retractions that had a disproportionate toxic effect like the STAP pubs. Maybe another calculation to do is the # of citations to a retracted paper.

DrugMonkey talks about perceived scientific backstabbing.