ACT Continues to Deceive

So, Advanced Cell Technology issued a press release today about its Dr. Robert Lanza testifying before a senate subcommittee about his great stem cell non-breakthrough. And despite being caught red-handed hyping the result of the experiment, the company’s PR team continues to spin the story like a gyroscope.

Of course, the press release conveniently omitted the part where an angry Senator Arlen Specter took Lanza and it bioethics adviser Ronald Green to the woodshed for deceiving the world. Instead, the press release quotes the company’s CEO as stating: “We believe our technology offers a significant forward step in the field of regenerative medicine and adds to the array of available technologies. Since Dr. Lanza testified here last year, we have progressed from applying the single-cell derivation technique from the mouse to the human.”

There is no new “our technology” yet that removes one cell from a human embryo that survives and develops from it an embryonic stem cell line and indeed, such a method may never be developed. Nor have ACT scientists applied the “single-cell derivation technique” in humans. They destroyed all the embryos, then took most of their cells, kept them in close communication, which may be necessary to the development of the ES cell lines, and derived two stem cell lines from a total of 91 cells. (Details here.)

This is hardly what ACT’s CEO states in the company press release. Indeed, the company continues to strongly imply its scientists accomplished something that they did not do successfully. Shameful.