Tag adult stem cells

All the News Redux

Ed

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.

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All the News That’s Not Fit to Print

Ed

<<With apologies to the New York Times.>>

I know I’m really behind in my reading, but I ran across a item of interest in the November 2008 issue of Scientific American that I wanted to share. In the “In Brief” sidebar of their News Scan section, there was a short item on page 36. It mentions a new successful treatment in mice for strokes. What they don’t tell you is actually much more interesting.

I haven’t been able to locate the original reference to the specific study they mention, so I don’t know precisely what type of stem cells the researchers were using in that study: embryonic stem cells,  adult stem cells, or induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). However, as far back as 2004, researchers were already treating strokes in research animals using adult stem cells, one of the types of stem cells that does not require the destruction of a human embryo.

Continue reading “All the News That’s Not Fit to Print” →