One of the biggest stem cell news stories of 2016 has been the REGROW Act, a bill intended to accelerate investigational stem cell and regenerative medicine therapies to patients by lessening FDA oversight, but in the last couple months REGROW has mostly disappeared from the news. Will REGROW do a reappearing act like some kind …
Politicians including Trump may start talking about CRISPR more and more in the near future. What if politicians weighed in on CRISPR with Tweets or statements in debates? What if this happened during the particularly charged time of a political campaign such as now? Below is a Saturday science satire in that spirit of imagined Tweets …
If Trump & Other Politicians Debated #CRISPR: Saturday Science Satire Read More »
By Heather Main I moved to the San Diego from Australia in August 2015, and Paul asked me if I could write something on my first impressions of doing science in the US, as opposed to other countries I have worked/studied in (Australia, Scotland, Sweden and Singapore). If you look at the land size of …
First impressions of the US stem cell environment from an Aussie Read More »
Forget retracting a paper, could Paolo Macchiarini try to get a retraction of Vanity Fair piece on his wild personal life an CV? Macchiarini is one of the more well-known stem cell and regenerative medicine researchers, and not always related to good news. You can see read posts I’ve done on him on this blog including …
Vanity Fair Dissects Stem Cell Surgeon Macchiarini in Exposé Read More »
This is blog post #1 from Day 1 of the National Academy of Sciences meeting on Human Gene editing. Some of the post may be written on the fly given the quick timeline of the meeting. Updates will sometimes be added to existing posts. See the subsequent three posts on the rest of the day here, …
Live Blog #GeneEditSummit Day 1 Post 1: Context & Science Read More »
The White House seems to be getting more active on genetics in the last six months. It’s refreshing to see them actually talking about real, important science. My feeling has been that up until now they’ve been giving too little attention to science so even if you may disagree with some aspects of what they …
The Obama Administration today weighed in on human germline genetic modification such as via CRISPR via a note from John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The White House indicated support for the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Academy …
White House supports moratorium on heritable human CRISPR Read More »
A new patent has been awarded to James Sherley for a very unusual method claimed for making induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The patent, No. 8,759,098, claims that a single non-genetic chemical agent, xanthine, can by itself reprogram adult stem cells (ASC) into iPS cells (aka iPSCs; see image they released at left). Surprising patent, huh? Another …
Sherley patent for reprogramming method like STAP cells Read More »
Is the new multi-billion dollar NIH Brain Initiative a stroke of madness or genius? For some non-brain researchers scrambling for funding from NIH, it could well just give them a stroke. At the same time as the NIH and Obama are asking for $4.5 billion (yes, with a b) for the new “big science” Brain …
Multi-Billion Dollar NIH Brain Initiative A Stroke of Genius or Madness? Read More »
The future is now. Or so goes the expression. For CIRM, it rings true today. Last year I blogged about what we might expect from the new CIRM that would evolve and take form in the future. I was particularly thinking about this coming incarnation of CIRM, which I called CIRM 2.0, as it related …