George Daley, a stem cell scientist at Children’s Hospital in Boston explains on YouTube why it was so hard to tell whether Hwang’s cloned stem cells were real. You can find MIT’s Rudy Jaenisch there too, but it’s harder.

I scanned through 10 pages of stem cell video listings and found plenty of politicians, a stem-cell folk song that seems to confuse pluripotency with reincarnation, and a tale of stem-cell monsters that fortunately acknowledged itself as science fiction. I found only one posting by a scientific institution whose name I recognized : Children’s Hospital.

It was Children’s Hospitals’ first foray onto the public video posting site, said Bess Andrews of the public affairs office. “We did a fairly long interview with [George Daley] to put on our own website, and we decided that it would have a broader reach if we put it on YouTube.” The video clearly describes three ways to make embryonic stem cells and how resultant cells can be distinguished. It doesn’t allow comments though.

You can see the video here. The full set of videos is available directly from Children’s Hospital.

The posting went up on August 2 and had been viewed 95 times by August 21. I also found a clear, balanced explanation of using differentiated cells to make cells like embryonic stem cells from Rudy Jaenisch, which had been viewed 589 times. Unfortunately, the video is posted without even mentioning his name (or at least not in a way that I found it). The poster is listed as Alyssa Kneller, who writes for Jaenisch’s Whitehead Institute. I have to admit that I’d overlooked the video initially because I was scanning for names I recognized.

I’m really pleased that scientists’ own explanations can be found on YouTube , even if they are being posted there by their communications officers. I hope to find more, and I hope they’ll say where they’re from. Teaching people what sources are trustworthy helps if they have some trustworthy sources.

To give credit where credit is due, I found out about George Daley’s YouTube debut from blogger Atilla Csordas and I found the blog itself through Nature’s very own search engine, Scintilla.