Search Results for: ips cells

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 […]

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

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

The Catholic Church, particularly the Vatican, has a bit of a split personality when it comes to stem cells and other “controversial issues” such as assisted reproduction and contraception. Officially, they oppose these things, but behind the scenes most everyday ordinary Catholics support them. This divide has become all the more apparent in the last

Of course stem cells and their caretakers never sleep or take the weekend off, right? But still TGIF! Last week we had some really good and some ugly stem cell headlines that I covered here. How was this week? Good. ES cell differentiation requires chromatin compaction. A PLoS Genetics paper by a team led by Yuhong

A rumor is now going around that some dubious stem cell docs and clinics are likely to get visits from the FBI soon! The FDA, which has just recently issued a couple warning letters (here and here), potentially together with the FBI, may be poised to take more decisive action in the near future in the next

The Mainstream Media has cranked up its hyping of stem cell cosmetics and sports medicine just in the last week or so. It’s really disturbing. The message is unmistakable: stem cell-based sports medicine and cosmetics are cutting edge new medicines that because they work for the stars will also work for ordinary people too.  ….Or