Search Results for: stap cell

Ear-itating: Awesome John Oliver Invokes Vacanti Mouse While Blistering Dr. Oz

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Mouse-support-group

What is the Vacanti Mouse? Comedian John Oliver has an absolutely blistering segment (see below) on Dr. Oz in which he skewers the physician huckster. The video includes incredibly telling Oz testimony before Congress in which the celebrity doctor seems frankly pretty pathetic and cannot answer even simple questions about his selling of arguably snake oil on […]

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RIKEN Report Is Virtual Acid Bath of Criticism for Obokata

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si-Haruko

RIKEN Institute in Japan has formally announced the complete findings of its investigation into the STAP cell research,  Haruko Obokata, and Nature papers. RIKEN almost entirely blamed Obokata for the STAP mess in this report and they didn’t mince words. The RIKEN report alleged that Obokata had engaged in two instances of “research misconduct” as

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Review of Docere Clinics run by Harry Adelson including total-body injections

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Amy Killen, Docere Clinic

In today’s post, I reviewed a stem cell clinic firm called Docere Clinics. In my opinion, there are some concerning issues here and reasons for caution. One type of procedure at Docere is particularly surprising and raises risks in my view. What is Docere Clinics? | What kind of stem cells does Docere use? | What they

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Keep calm & CRISPR on: perspectives on report of human Cas9 immunity

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Keep-calm-CRISPR-on

The news that CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in its current form may not work in a substantial fraction of people due to many of us having immunity to Cas9 came as a shock to many, but if you think about it, maybe it’s not so surprising. I don’t see it as the end of the world. A (preprint) from

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Scientist’s dilemma: find a public voice on big issues or stay silent?

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Scientists-Dilemma

There is a scientist’s dilemma: should you speak out on important, sometimes controversial issues in science, where you not only can potentially have positive impact, but also risk being attacked for it? Or do you remain silent? I’ve now been blogging for more than 7 years. I’ve battled the often exploitive for-profit stem cell clinics

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Nature Biotechnology looking at NgAgo paper amidst reproducibility concerns

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NgAgo-China-newspaper

When potentially game changing new technologies are reported such as NgAgo gene editing, both scientists and the public get excited, but especially if such new reports stem from a single paper it is wise to take a cautious approach for a while. The key question is whether the new findings will turn out to be

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Science press releases behaving badly: time to start tracking their retractions?

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Science-Press-Release-Retraction

Over at RetractionWatch, their team does a great job following retractions of science papers. Sadly, the number of published manuscript retractions gives them more than enough material to post several times a day. There’s another phenomenon going on that I think might warrant their increased attention: the possibly rising number of retractions or corrections of science

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Weekend science reading: fantastic found links including on CIRM

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glioblastomaWiki

David Jensen reports on the future of CIRM as a “beautiful machine”. CIRM funds brain cancer research in a big way: Funding a clinical trial for deadly cancer is a no brainer. Glioblastoma is a fatal tumor that needs new clinical approaches so this is exciting. One of the goals of my lab is to find new

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

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Wild-West

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

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