Remember Paolo Macchiarini, the famous-turned-infamous so-called “stem cell surgeon” who ended up in legal trouble and with trial participants who died? Before we get into this we have a new feature for our weekly reads, which is the stem cell and regenerative medicine tweet of the week. See that at the bottom of the post.
Another Macchiarini pub is toast
Some of Macchiarini’s troubled papers have lived on unretracted. Now another one of them is toast.
We have this from Retraction Watch: Five years after saying it won’t retract Macchiarini paper, journal does so. He still has some unretracted papers in The Lancet too, although earlier this year two of them earned expressions of concern. It seems Macchiarini is now busy as a surgeon. Not sure if he’s still doing anything stem cell related.
Other reads
- A high-quality cloned journal has duped hundreds of scholars, and has no reason to stop, Retraction Watch. Here at The Niche we usually think of other meanings when cloning is brought up but cloned journals? You can see how AI could help future journal cloners.
- Longevity Seekers Embraced This Drug. But Does It Actually Fight Aging?, WSJ. Does it work in people?
- MLL3/MLL4 methyltransferase activities control early embryonic development and embryonic stem cell differentiation in a lineage-selective manner, Nat Gen.
- New effort IDs the genes that made the mammoth, Ars Technica. Here’s the original research article in Current Biology: Genomics of adaptive evolution in the woolly mammoth. Could this impact efforts at woolly mammoth de extinction? Also see my video below.
Tweet of the week
If you showed this picture at a stem cell scientific conference 6 years ago and said it was made from cultured chicken cells and would be legally sold to U.S. consumers in 2023, you would have been laughed out of the room.
But it would all be true… pic.twitter.com/NILpRiBuXr
— Elliot Swartz (@elliotswartz) April 6, 2023
The lab-grown or cultured meat industry keeps mooing and bock-bocking along.