Here’s another example of deliberate misinformation, if not by commission then by omission.

The April 2009 issue of Scientific American–and no, I have not caught up on my reading, I was just browsing around the Internet–has a short news item on the successful treatment of 21 patients with multiple sclerosis (as I wrote about in “All the News That’s Not Fit to Print“). The treatment involved using bone marrow cells, which are adult stem cells. And yet the little news piece is coupled with the excitement of “data from stem cell therapies in general” becoming available soon because the FDA has approved the first human embryonic stem cell trial.

Maybe it’s just me, but…this is completely deceptive.

First you read about a successful treatment using bone marrow stem cells, then you read about how we’re going to start getting more data on stem cell treatments because human embryonic stem cell trials will start soon. The magazine reports this as if the bone marrow stem cell treatments that have already been proven to work on humans isn’t giving us enough data to pursue this as a regular course of treatment. So who is really holding up medical progress: those who insist on pursuing embryonic stem cell research or those who are already treating people using adult stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells?

Read the Scientific American news item here (scroll down, it’s the third item called Forward with Stem Cells) and then post a comment calling them on the carpet for their deception.