What’s better than fresh “fruit” from your own tomato garden? For the last few years when I think about planning my summer tomato garden, I start months in advance preparing the soil. I had fava beans as my cover crop all this past winter and tilled it into the soil late in winter. It adds …
About once each year or two, I try to schedule what I call a “big picture” lab meeting where my lab and I discuss major issues related to being a scientist. Also, I try to answer their questions about just about anything. In my lab we rotate between various lab meeting formats and also have …
The big picture lab meeting: ethics, careers, publishing & other questions Read More »
2018 has started quickly on the stem cell and regenerative medicine research front with many interesting new papers and a lot of headlines. You can see my predictions for this year here. Below is a list of some of the more notable papers and striking news headlines. Note that just because I listed a news …
Reading list of recent stem cell pubs & headlines Read More »
Are you a risk-taker or do you do everything possible to avoid risks? Taking risks in science is necessary, but is there a wise way to take the risks you do? Science and medicine need a certain amount of risk and risk-takers to make transformative leaps forward. The risks in biomedical science can be conceptual …
Some thoughts on taking risks in science & medicine Read More »
Grad school…would you do it all over again if you could jump in a time machine? It’s hard to imagine, but it was 24 years ago that I started at UCSD as a graduate student. Think how different the world was in 1993. Now almost a quarter century later, the world of science is very …
Twenty years later: would this dataholic still go to grad school? Read More »
Robots versus scientists? Over the centuries, humans have sometimes had a fear of replacement, whether it is by another human as exemplified in Dostoevsky’s classic short story The Double (or other literature on doubles/doppelgängers) or by machines, most notably robots. Could we be replaced by robots, artificial intelligence (AI), or cyborgs? In some ways, robots …
When patient families reach out to me, one of the most common questions is whether stem cells for autism offer real hope. The short answer at this time remains “no”. Of course, it’s not as simple as just “no” because there isn’t enough data to be sure, but there is reason for major skepticism about …
Why I am still very skeptical about stem cells for autism Read More »
I received a score of great nominations for the Stem Cell Person of the Year 2016 Award and have briefly described the twenty nominees below. The point of the award is to honor the top positive stem cell leader who specifically thinks outside the box and takes risks. I’ve started an on-line vote where you can vote once per day for …
20 Nominees for Stem Cell Person of the Year 2016 Award Read More »
Haruko Obokata is most well-known for her role as first author of the now retracted two STAP cell Nature papers. These manuscripts claimed to have made pluripotent and even totipotent stem cells simply by stressing cells out with acid treatment or in other ways. Nobody else could get this method to work to create the so-called …
Haruko Obokata (小保方 晴子) website posts dubious STAP cell validation data Read More »
A great new piece in The New Yorker by Dana Goodyear, The Stress Test, gives us a window into Charles Vacanti’s side of the STAP cell mess and includes recent quotes from him. It’s a long, fascinating look inside of STAP, the tangled and ultimately tragic scientific implosion that created and then brought down two Nature …