The Niche
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Recently, I co-chaired a meeting where scientists made a cogent argument for creating a regional stem cell network. A summary of the meeting will be posted on Nature Reports Stem Cells and circulated as an insert in Nature. I hope that the conversation can continue here.
Bob Lanza, scientific head of ACT, says he's generated three embryonic stem cell lines without destroying embryos. These would be the first embryonic stem cell lines ever made where an embryo wasn't destroyed. In fact, he's waiting to see if the NIH will fund research on these lines on the grounds that, since no embryo was destroyed, these lines should be eligible for federal grants. Other scientists at the meeting are skeptical. They say they need to see data.
Continue reading "Embryonic stem cells made without destroying embryos" »
“We’ve gone as far away from Boston as possible to go,” Paul Simmons, outgoing head of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, told sparse attendees at an organizational meeting in Cairns, Australia on June.
Bob Klein, largely responsible for the legislation that earmarked $3 billion for California stem cell research, has joined the advisory board of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. The announcement came at the end of a tired town hall meeting that capped sessions of scientific talks.
George Daley, incoming president of the society, said that Klein was going to help ISSCR figure out what its mission should be. He wants to give the society more emphasis on research, and he wants to stop fund-raising every time they want to take on a project. He wants a council that will be very philanthropically involved, he says. Well, it’s hard to imagine a better choice.
Continue reading "Prop 71 instigator to advise international stem cell society " »
By Natalie DeWitt and Monya Baker
Monkey embryonic stem cells have, for the first time, been created through somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). All attempts to make human embryonic stem cells through nuclear transfer so far have failed, but Jamie Thomson got the recipe for human embryonic stem cells by first doing so in monkeys, so researchers will likely be going to Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon National Primate Research Center for advice. Mitalipov made his announcement Monday at the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Cairns, Australia, in a special add-on presentation . This finding represents a proof of principle that therapeutic cloning to create patient-specific ES cell lines could work in primates.
Continue reading "Oregon scientist reports first ES cells from cloned primate embryos" »
Posted by Natalie DeWitt for Monya Baker
South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang actually did achieve an important first, just not the one he claimed. I was at the meeting where Hwang said, falsely, that he’d created the first human embryonic stem cell through cloning. It felt like a rock concert, except attendees held up recorders instead of lighters.
It turns out that Hwang might have gotten some rock-star status just by sticking to the truth. The human embryonic stem cells he made came from a parthenote, or an activated, unfertilized egg, and he really did do it first. George Daley, a stem cell scientist from Children’s Hospital, Boston, announced this fact to an absolutely packed crowd in an exhibit hall at the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Cairns, Australia. That Hwang's line came from a parthenote had been suspected, but this line of evidence hadn't been presented before.
(Last year, Tiziana Brevini and Fulvio Gandolfi of the University of Milan announced that they had derived two stem cell lines from 104 eggs that had been donated to fertility clinics. The news story is here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7097/full/4411038a.html)
Over a year and a half ago, everyone assumed that cloning human embryonic stem cells had been reduced to practice. Now, Hwang is a symbol for the biggest scientific fraud so far this century.
Daley described how embryonic stem cells derived from parthenotes could generate transplant tissue less subject to immune rejection, and I think about how when I bump in from stem cell scientists from South Korea, they tend to bring up Hwang in the first few sentences. They have done nothing wrong, but they still seem embarrassed. Had Hwang simply stuck to his real achievement, they would be proud.
(In a subsequent post, I’ll describe Daley’s work comparing how embryonic stem cells made through cloning differ from their parthenote-derived equivalents.)
The people in the airport keep calling me “love”. Telltale cardboard tubes show who on the airport shuttle bus is headed to the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Cairns, Australia. I start chatting with a young blonde professor from Sweden who is turning embryonic stem cells into neurons, and she laughs as she tells me she sometimes hates human cells. Mice ES can generate neurons in maybe 10 days, but human ones take 20 or even 50.
Just before the bus heads off, another researcher boards. He was born in Iran but he moved to Sweden in his youth, and the two scientists talk across me in Scandanavian syllables. He's a former surgeon happens to be working in lower back pain caused by tissue degeneration. He’s been trying to implant mouse cells into damaged rabbit spines, but he’s frustrated because bone growth in rabbits mean the cells won’t take hold. He’s soon to move to a new lab where he can try the same thing in pigs; he’s excited to get started. “Pigs,” he keeps saying, referring to the innards of the spinal cord. “They look just humans.”
My week in Japan drove home the obvious. English-speaking researchers need one major talent to prove themselves: the ability to do science. Non-English speakers need two: science and English. This will be true for the foreseeable future, but the scientific community should take steps to lessen its impact.
Doing so will benefit both English and non-English speakers. If non-English speakers are able to publish more easily, knowledge will be available more quickly, so advances can be quickly validated and adopted by others.
Posted by Natalie DeWitt for Attila Csordás
The sea squirt can regenerate its whole body from the vasculature. Here Attila Csordás interviews Ayelet Voskoboynik, postdoctoral fellow from the Weissman lab, Stanford University, to tell us how.
Their findings were published in a recent paper, entitled Striving for normality: whole body regeneration through a series of abnormal generations
(FASEB Journal, 2007 May;21(7):1335-44.)
Continue reading "Insights to regeneration from the sea squirt-- an interview" »
In the aftermath of the Hwang scandal in 2006, Nature editors thought long and hard about whether journals could employ editorial procedures that might prevent publication of such fraudulent data in the future, at least in the area of cloning and nuclear transfer research. We queried several top scientists in the cloning and stem cell fields on this issue, and published the major conclusions in the editorial entitled Standards for papers on cloning.
Several of these scientists have agreed for Nature Reports Stem Cells to publish abridged versions of their 2006 answers in The Niche. Open the Comments below to read the postings of George Daley, Shin-Ichi Nishikawa, Alan Trounson, Alan Colman, Robert Lanza, Teruhiko Wakayama, Bob Wall, and Mark Westhusin, on whether the Hwang scandal could have been prevented, and what tactics journals should implement in the future to tighten up cloning papers. Feel free to join in the discussion by posting your own comments.
Continue reading "How can journals improve peer review of cloning papers?" »