The FDA has been busy with stem cell-related activities this spring. Busier than publicly apparent. Very busy, indeed! Earlier, I reported that they issued a warning letter to cosmetician to the stars, Dr. LookGood, as well as one to another doc selling stem cell therapies. Now it seems apparent that even more is going on …
FDA visits both ICMS and reportedly Celltex: the scoop! Read More »
It’s been a big couple weeks of headlines in the news for prostate cancer. Let me help you make sense of it all. I’m a prostate cancer survivor and cancer biologist. Prostate cancer is almost an inevitable fate for men in America and for many around the world, but a significant fraction of the cancers …
Making sense of all the big prostate cancer headlines of the last few weeks Read More »
Why is the Texas stem cell company Celltex so super duper private about itself? I’m not sure. It has been the subject of much discussion in the stem cell field in the past year. Unfortunately, much of the news has been negative, largely related to their former head of ethics, Glenn McGee, who also was …
How do you use Twitter as a scientist? If you know how to Tweet (posting things on Twitter), you have a new avenue for interacting with the world including colleagues, students, editors, etc. Twitter can be a very powerful tool for scientists. If you, as a scientist, don’t use it you are putting yourself at a …
Want to win $50 and become a published author? Enter the Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog Essay Contest. The challenge? Write a no more than 500 word, convincing, non-fiction essay on stem cells thinking entirely outside the box. Otherwise, the angle you take is totally up to you. Surprise me. Make me think. There will …
Stem Cell Essay Contest: $50 prize & essay is published Read More »
On Monday, I made a big stink about Texas GOP Governor Rick Perry visiting a lab (that of Jeanne Loring) at Scripps Research Institute here in California because the lab in question is a leading group doing human embryonic stem cell (HESC) and Perry is a strong opponent of such research. I thought the visit …
Great letter on Guv Perry’s California visit video from the artist Read More »
Here is the second installment in my “elephant in the lab” series, which addresses controversial or even taboo topics in laboratories and the sciences. The first segment was on taboo topics in the iPS cell field. People loved the honesty of that post. Today I am talking about how sometimes scientists kill each other’s papers …
Dirty dozen easy steps to killing a paper during review: elephant in the lab series Read More »
The number of stem cell clinics both in the U.S. and around the world continues to accelerate. There are in fact so many clinics that it would be difficult to keep track of them all. As a way of simply dipping one’s toe in the water of the ocean of clinics, I did a “stem …
Lessons from Google Ads for Stem Cell Clinics in May 2012 Read More »
Yesterday I did an interview with the President of ICMS and then today I did a follow-up post providing my recommendations to them publicly on how they should move forward. Why did I do this? Or to paraphrase a stem cell scientist who just now let me have it: “Why the #*@#$&^# did you do …
Two articles in today’s New York Times got me thinking about how science can be pursued privately or publicly. I believe that getting that mix of public and private science right will directly determine the fate of humanity. In a pop-science NYT piece, James Gorman writes about how people may in the not so distant …
Lessons from The Hunger Games about balancing science: public versus private Read More »