Last year an odd pub made the big claim that the interstitium is a new organ. I didn’t buy that. Now an over-the-top stem cell advertisement that recently ran in the San Diego Union-Tribune (U-T) is piggybacking off of the supposed “interstitium as new tissue” claim to make all kinds of other claims about some …
Wild stem cell ad piggybacks off hyped ‘interstitium is new tissue’ pub Read More »
I’ve been blogging about stem cells now for about 8 years and the recent level of hype about and fluffy media coverage of Celularity, the biotech spun out of Celgene, ranks right up here with the most extreme past cases I’ve seen. What is Celularity and who is its leadership? It’s a new biotech focused …
Just one word placentas: Can Celularity live up to hype? Read More »
Some conditions like Huntington’s Disease are so bad and there are no treatments such that any bit of encouraging news can be cause for legitimate excitement, but at the same time things can go too far potentially, especially if there is news coverage not backed up by a published paper or some other definitive source …
Hope & hype on unpublished Huntington’s Disease trial splashy news Read More »
Science hype is one of the more troublesome issues in our field today especially at its interface with the media, and unfortunately a ‘great’ example of that came this past week in a headline from the Daily Mail on the new CRISPR of human embryos paper from Kathy Niakan’s group in the UK. Although Niakan’s …
There’s an idea floating around out there called “young blood” to use donations from young folks to infuse older people to reverse aging. I’m skeptical. Imagine an old man and a teenager sitting side by side, with blood flowing from the kid to the oldster in a stab at anti-aging. Sort of like a one-way …
Young blood as anti-aging fountain of youth: hype or hope? Read More »
There is so much stem cell hype out there that sometimes it seems like almost daily up comes a headline that is so full of hype that it could be harmful, but a new piece from The Telegraph really takes the cake. It is entitled, “Hope of cure for arthritis, MS and diabetes as Stanford …
Huge stem cell hype from Telegraph on new Stanford paper Read More »
Was an intensely hyped Nature paper connected to the subsequent knighthood for one of the authors just two days after publication? It’s hard to imagine there isn’t a connection and such a link is bad news for biomedical science. Professor Doug Turnbull and fellow UK authors published a Nature paper a few days ago that reinforced a …
Hyped Nature paper & author knighthood 2 days later raise red flags Read More »
A new paper from a UK team yesterday showed that mitochondrial replacement therapy faces a serious and difficult safety hurdle fitting with similar findings from an earlier recent study from a different team led by Dieter Egli, but the UK media and some scientists there are engaging in hype, claiming the exact opposite. They are pushing the unscientific …
Mitochondrial Replacement Hype Goes Nuclear Including by Wellcome Trust Read More »
I wrote yesterday about two cases of science media hype on CRISPR and on stem cells for strokes. The latter case on stem cell hype stirred the most discussion and even some harsh words in the comments. As this stem cell stroke story on an encouraging but very small, preliminary study has unfolded across the …
Stroke story stem cell hype analysis: 9 very different headlines Read More »
Science hype deserves negative attention for the harm it does including both to science itself and to patients. I’ve seen two really egregious examples of hype lately in science headlines. First from the Washington Post comes a stem cell story with a very hype-ful title: Stanford researchers ‘stunned’ by stem cell experiment that helped stroke …
2 Recent Science Hype Awards on CRISPR & Stem Cells Read More »