Embryonic stem cell research claims are blowing up in the face of the media-again. On Wednesday, headlines around the world trumpeted news that Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) had been able to take a single embryonic stem cell (a blastomere) from 8-10 cell embryos without killing the embryos and at the same time grow embryonic stem cells lines from those single cells. That IS news.
Well, that’s what ACT reported in their press release to the media. That press release announced these as results of a study of their experiment in the science journal Nature. The media should have checked the actual study because the Nature article tells a different story. Not only were all of the human embryos killed, ACT scientists used 4-7 stem cells from each embryo, not just one. ACT grew 2 stem cell lines, but not from single cells plucked off an embryo. Another experiment suggests that it may not be possible to grow human embryonic stem cells from just one blastomere.
Embryonic stem cell research and reporting is increasingly fraudulent. Last year Science, a leading scientific periodical, published peer reviewed claims of South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk that he had cloned human embryos and had developed human embryonic stem cell lines from those cloned embryos. Woo-suk’s claims were completely fabricated.
Embryonic stem cell research is increasingly politicizing science. Even The New England Journal of Medicine has announced it will publish in the area of stem cell research with an eye to impacting the political debate. This is inappropriate and diminishes The NEJM’s reliability.
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