The first signs that the US is lagging behind in stem cell research started to show: for the first time, “scientists have created nearly a dozen new lines of human embryonic stem (ES) cells that […] carry the genetic signature of diseased or injured patients”, and this did not happen in America, but at Seoul National University in South Korea. Here is an explanation from The New York Times why it is important to get stem cells from cloned embrios rather than from surplus embrios from fertility clinics:

“Stem cells derived from cloned human embryos that are genetically matched to sick patients are potentially much more useful than stem cells derived from surplus embryos at fertility clinics, both for research and for potential treatments. Since cloned embryos carry the genetic makeup of patients with known diseases, scientists can study how those diseases develop from the earliest stages and can perhaps find drug treatments to interrupt the process. And if scientists ultimately succeed in converting the stem cells themselves into replacement tissues to repair damaged organs, those tissues would have the best chance of avoiding rejection by a patient’s immune system if they were genetically matched to the patient through therapeutic cloning.”

Scientists are excited — but, of course, some people immediately expressed their concerns. The president said today that “the use of federal money, taxpayers’ money, to promote science which destroys life in order to save life is – I’m against that.” Destroys life? What life? Using a few cells that happen to come from a fertilized egg in order to save real, living and breathing humans, whose quality of life could be tremendously improved with the potential new techniques — why is that unethical?

It is a lot more unethical to ban this kind of research just because one’s religion declares that life begins at conception. It makes sense to ban reproductive cloning because it is still unsafe. But to ban therapeutic cloning is utter nonsense, and it is really time to shut up for those who have only learned about genetics at Sunday school.

The New Scientist talks about “The 13 things that don’t make sense“. Some of the 13 items are at least questionable. For example, it seems to me pretty one-sided to claim that the experimental case for cold fusion is ‘bulletproof’. Bob Park has a much less positive view of the issue, for example here. Also, after reading Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, I thought that inflationary cosmology gave a good explanation for the ‘horizon problem’. According to the New Scientist, “In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.” The third item that I am quite skeptical about is number 4 – the Belfast homeopathy results:

“MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions – so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule – worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.”

I am looking forward to more results that show that homeopathy works. However, scientists and editors and journalists alike should keep in mind that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I have a feeling that New Scientist’s free advertisment for homeopaths was a bit too early and unnecessary.