"Science by Press Release"
My piece on the Advanced Cell Technology mendacity and the media malpractice scandal is now up at the Weekly Standard. The piece is about 1000 words, but here are a few highlights:
"'NEW STEM CELL METHOD avoids destroying embryos,' the New York Times headline blared. 'Stem cell breakthrough may end political logjam,' chimed in the Los Angeles Times. 'Embryos spared in stem cell creation,' affirmed USA Today. Reporting the same supposed scientific achievement by Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), the Washington Post quoted the company's bioethics adviser Ronald Green: 'You can honestly say this cell line is from an embryo that was in no way harmed or destroyed.'
"Unfortunately, you can't 'honestly' say that. The above headlines--like Green's statement and innumerable similar press accounts around the world--are just plain wrong. While ACT did indeed issue a press release heralding its embryonic stem cell experiment as having 'successfully generated human embryonic stem cells using an approach that does not harm embryos,' the actual report of the research led by ACT chief scientist Robert Lanza, published in Nature, tells a very different story. In fact, Lanza destroyed all 16 of the embryos he used, just as in conventional embryonic stem cell research."
...
"Reporters should be more sophisticated. They should know that the history of science is rife with promising early experiments that never came to fruition. Reporters should be especially aware of this in the field of cloning research, where the old saying, "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me," definitely applies.
"And this is especially relevant to ACT. For, though the company has never been guilty of the outright scientific fraud perpetrated by South Korean cloning researcher Wu-suk Hwang, its misleading press release is all too typical. In the last few years, ACT's publicity department has repeatedly generated high-visibility stories about supposed scientific breakthroughs--which turned out later to be grossly exaggerated or flat-out false."
I then describe three of these hyped reports about ACT, and conclude with the following:
"So now, it's deja vu all over again, with ACT lionized by a media stampede over a purported research breakthrough that the company did not actually achieve. This is not to say, of course, that deriving embryonic stem cell lines from a procedure that allows the embryo to survive is impossible--only that it hasn't been done. Lanza's experiment does demonstrate that stem cell lines can be obtained earlier than previously thought. But that wasn't good enough for ACT's publicity office or the lazy reporters who regurgitated the press release. The failure to report this story accurately amounts to massive journalistic malpractice--and once again ACT is laughing all the way to the bank."
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:44 PM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
I get the following qoute from a May, 2005 White Paper put out by The President's Council on Bioethics:
"The recent work of Strelchenko and colleagues with disaggregated 8-24-cell embryos suggests that whole human embryos as early as the 8-cell stage are potentially usable as a source of pluripotent stem cells.
This work would have to be reproduced and refined before we could be certain that embryos at such an early stage are indeed a dependable source of stem cells.
It would then have to be shown that stem cells can also be derived from
isolated blastomeres extracted from an 8-cell embryo.
It seems far from certain that enough cells can be extracted from the embryo to derive stem cells while also avoiding injury to the embryo."
This is a good statement of what was understood a year ago. The scientific challenge was to create a stem cell line from an isolated blastomere, simply because it was known that the removal of only one cell from an eight cell embryo would still leave that embryo viable. Thus if an isolated blastomere could produce a stem cell line you would then have both that line and a still viable life. This would be significant. This is what ACT claimed to have achieved. In fact, while they didn't use whole, disassociated embryos, they did use four to seven cells from an eight cell unit, which is pretty darn close to the same thing, it's uncertain that it differs meaningfully from Strelchenko's work, and the embryo is just as dead.
So, while I haven't read the paper in Nature, I'm unable to see that there was much scientific advance. The only thing new was the stunningly dishonest press release. And of course this is just exactly what you've said.
www.bioethics.gov/reports/white_paper/text.html White Paper, May 2005, The President's Council on Bioethics
Wesley,
Thanks for being an outstanding upstream news and commentary provider.
Could you repost, proide a link to or update your previous comments on what this means to the credibility of the MSM medical reporters, the MSM itself, and the scientific community? I think that's a big story. I just told a reporter that this is the second story that's blown up in their faces in the last year or so.
This is at least the FOURTH story involving ACT that was wildly hyped. If the media refuse to learn not to trust that outfit, there isn't much more I can do. Thanks, Don.
Mouse: The Nature experiment might have been very little, or it might have been a double that ACT pretended was a grand slam home run. See my latest entry as to why. Thanks.
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