I wrote earlier this week about genome sequencing of famous dead celebrities, pointing out that the trend seems full of ethical complexities. Genome news More broadly, sequencing the genomes of non-celebrities from hundreds or thousands of years ago can be important research. A new NYT piece covers such work on the Swahili people. Such research …
Weekly reads: genome sequencing, chemical reprogramming 2.0 Read More »
Someday could human brain organoids get to the point of having organized human-like thoughts? Even consciousness? The more time passes, the less likely I think this is. It’s not impossible, but brain organoids have big limitations in that regard. To be clear, I don’t mean brain organoids having some vaguely human brain-like electrical activity. Even monolayers of …
Stem cell research ethics topics: organoid consciousness & embryo models Read More »
Occasionally when I write a post there is an angry reaction to it in the blog comments, which was the case for my recent fact-check of the LifeWave X39 patches. As you can see in that post, I didn’t find convincing data to either back up the claimed stem cell connection. In my opinion, there …
Weekly reads: bat stem cells & viruses, Lineage Cell, He Jiankui visa Read More »
Have you had the chance to play around on ChatGPT, the open AI? It can “talk” to you in text kind of like a person. I have tried it out. It’s quite interesting to type in scientific questions and see what pops out. Often it is high-quality text and solid ideas, but not always. You …
Weekly reads: ChatGPT as author, COVID pub concern, CRISPR kit Read More »
It’s always exciting when your lab has a new paper and my team just published a study knocking out the H3f3a gene in mice, which codes for histone H3.3 protein. We found that loss of this gene leads to lethality at a late stage of embryonic development. There were also indications of more specific phenotypes …
Weekly reads: H3.3 on the brain, Texas bill, HSCs Read More »
Toward the end of each year, I make stem cell & regenerative medicine predictions for the coming year. It’s a fun tradition here on The Niche that goes way back. The stem cell field has changed dramatically as reflected in each year’s predictions. Here’s a list of past predictions with my grades of how they …
2023 stem cell & regenerative medicine predictions Read More »
Today’s post is on the lighter side with some humor on funny autocorrect fails related to science. It’s surprising sometimes how far certain tools can lag behind cutting-edge science. Spellcheck tools are useful, of course, but they don’t always know what to do with STEM words. The same is true of tools like Grammarly, although it …
Funny autocorrect fails in STEM: the gremlin organdy fiasco Read More »
When you are a stem cell biologist and especially if you do a blog, you sometimes run across very strange things like a chimera cat. In this case, I stumbled on the whole topic of chimeric cats because I was searching for info on chimeric rats on Google. Of course, I was. It’s kind of …
Weekly reads: chimera cat vs. chimeric rat, cheap sequencing, more Read More »
Does aging do something to time so it seems like as you get older that time goes by faster? Remember as a little kid when summer seemed to last forever and car rides could be agonizingly long? I’ve heard two theories on this. One is that the brain’s baseline of activity slows down with aging …
Weekly stem cell reads: aging & cells, iPS cell mutations, gut, more Read More »
Stem cell biologist Jacob Hanna has a new startup called Renewal Bio. Its goal is to harvest cells or tissues from human embryo or fetus models for clinical use. I believe that their commercial ambitions have so far outstripped careful thought and discussion in the broader community of researchers. There are major risks here for …
‘We don’t want to freak people out’: about that Jacob Hanna human embryo model startup Read More »