Stem Cells Again

The Herald Sun reported today about the company that previously developed a method of taking one cell from a pre-embryonic blastocyst (at the eight-celled stage of development) and replicating it to produce lots of embryonic stem cells "safely." This new procedure was touted as a way to get embryonic stem cells without the teeny-tiny ethical problem of destroying the embryo.

Advanced Cell researchers previously said they had found a way to take a single cell from very young embryos and grow that into a batch of stem cells, leaving the embryo intact. They offer it as a way around an impasse surrounding stem cell research.

But what the Herald Sun didn't mention was this item from Catholic News on September 6, 2006.

Last month, biotechnology company Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) stunned the worldwide scientific community and the public when it announced it developed a method to make embryonic stem cells using a technique that did not harm embryos from which the cells were derived.

But within days, Nature sent out two revised press releases apologizing to journalists that its original statement was partially in error and that the embryos used to produce the stem cells did not survive the process. "We feel it necessary to explain that this paper demonstrates that human embryonic stem cells can be grown from single cells, but that the embryos that were used for these experiments did not remain intact," Nature said. (emphasis added)

The embryos died. All of them. In experiments that are still being touted as having spared the embryos in question.

This is from the Herald Sun:

The WiCell Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin and California- and Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology said they would work together to give batches of the cells to researchers, provided the federal government agrees to fund them.

Does anybody making federal stem cell policy decisions read the Catholic News? Do any of them know the embryos died? Will they be told before they make a decision?

What a scam! Announce an ethical breakthrough that doesn't exist and splash it all over the news. Release a correction and bury it. Then ask the federal government--not private investment companies--to fund this ethically phony process to produce unproven stem cells.

I'm appalled. I'm aghast. I'm astounded that this company may get away with it.