FIC Blog

And that’s actually the charitable interpretation. The less charitable one is that the editors don’t bother to read their own paper. From yesterday’s editorial:

A breakthrough in human embryonic stem cell research that does not involve destruction of embryos ought to be cause for celebration.
Scientists at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester have reported a method of creating the generic cells in a laboratory dish without apparent harm to the host. Dr. Robert Lanza, medical director for the company and senior author of the study, hailed the discovery correctly as having the potential to satisfy “reasonable” ethical concerns.

A single cell or blastomere was removed from a viable eight-cell embryo and coaxed biochemically to grow to the point of producing stem cells that are capable of becoming any cell in the human body. Some of those cells were then stimulated to produce blood vessels, retinal cells and other potentially healing tissue.
No apparent harm would be done to the host embryo with this method.

Note the paper’s sleight of hand in that last sentence: no harm “would be” done to the embryo using this method. Why did the editors not say that none of the embryos “had been” harmed in the alleged breakthrough in Worcester? Because the embryos had all been killed.

And that is just one of several obfuscating assertions in the editorial. Here is an excerpt from an article on the “breakthrough” that appeared in the Courant over a week ago:

But in an unusual move Friday, Nature corrected wording in a lay-language news release it had distributed in advance and posted clarifying data it asked the scientists to provide.
At the core of the battle is a widely distributed e-mail from Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who raised three issues.
First, he said the scientists did not make clear that no embryos survived their experiments. In fact, data in the paper do make that clear, but Nature’s initial release said otherwise…

Doerflinger said it was also deceptive for the scientists to say that single embryo cells were coaxed to grow into colonies of stem cells. In the experiment, he noted, those single cells were allowed to feed on hormones secreted by other cells in the nutrient media in which they were grown. That leaves the question, he said, of whether a single cell can become a colony on its own…

A third point of contention is that the report includes a photo of a mature embryo, healthy and poised to grow into a fetus after having survived the removal of a single cell. Doerflinger said the photo is deceptive because no embryos in the experiment were allowed to develop that far.

Doerflinger exposes as false the claim that single embryo cells were coaxed into producing pluripotent stem cells. But—by using ambiguous language like “coaxed…to the point of“—the Courant gives its readers the impression that it actually happened.

The editors’ claim that the potential of embryonic stem cells “outweighs the ethical concerns about destroying embryos created for fertility reasons that are otherwise discarded” is also misleading. When state researcher “Jerry” Yang tells local newspapers he wants to clone human embryos he is not talking about already existing embryos “that are otherwise discarded.” Taxpayer funds are going to be used to clone and kill human embryos.

The scandal of fraudulent stem cell research in South Korea has given an already dubious project a bad reputation. Closer to home, ethical concerns about the disbursement of state funds for embryonic stem cell research—concerns expressed in a recent Courant op-ed—have left a huge question mark over the whole enterprise. And now the Courant’s editors misleads the public on the state of the research. It is a strange way for the paper to aid one of its favorite causes.