Indian PM Narendra Modi visits stem cell research lab in Kyoto Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits the cutting edge stem cell research lab in Kyoto, on the second day of his official visit. By: MEA India File … Continue reading →

Ice bucket challenge don't agree with stem cell research but I'll donate to the charity of my choice via YouTube Capture. By: Robin Cuellar … Continue reading →

The promise of embryonic stem cell research has been thwarted by an inability to answer a simple question: How do you know a good stem cell from a bad one? Yale researchers report in the Sept. 4 issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell that they have found a marker that predicts which batch of personalized stem cells will develop into a variety of tissue types and which will develop into unusable placental or tumor-like tissues. Scientists have been unable to capitalize on revolutionary findings in 2006 that adult cells could be made young again with the simple introduction of four factors. Hopes were raised that doctors would soon have access to unlimited supplies of a patients own iPSCs induced pluripotent stem cells that could be used to repair many types of tissue damage. However, efforts to direct these cells to therapeutic goals have proved difficult. Many attempts to use cells clinically have failed because they form tumors instead of the desired tissue. The team of Yale Stem Cell Center researchers led by senior author Andrew Xiao identified a variant histone a protein that helps package DNA which can predict the developmental path of iPSC cells in mice. An accompanying … Continue reading →

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 4-Sep-2014 Contact: Abby Abazorius abbya@mit.edu 617-253-2709 Massachusetts Institute of Technology It is one of the highest-profile cases of scientific fraud in memory: In 2005, South Korean researcher Woo-Suk Hwang and colleagues made international news by claiming that they had produced embryonic stem cells from a cloned human embryo using nuclear transfer. But within a year, the work had been debunked, soon followed by findings of fraud. South Korea put a moratorium on stem-cell research funding. Some scientists abandoned or reduced their work in the field. But the case is not so simple: By 2007, other stem-cell researchers had found that the debunked research contained a few solid findings amid the false claims. While prior stem-cell findings remained intact, it took time to rebuild support for the field. Now a study by MIT scholars quantifies the fallout for scientists whose fields suffer high-profile retractions, with a twist: Even valid older research, when cited in a retracted study, loses credibility especially if the retracted paper involves malfeasance. The fallout from a retraction does not land solely on the scientists who are at fault, but on people in the field more broadly. As the new paper contends, "scientific misconduct and … Continue reading →