Geron his issued another press release claiming advances in embryonic stem cell research, and once again saying, as it has for years, that the company is very close to human trials. But that is not the point of this post.
The Geron experiment apparently used rats with damaged hearts. The rats were killed after four weeks, too soon to know whether tumors would form. But get this headline in the Mercury News!
The capital letters are within the text.Geron sees progress in stem-cell therapy: STUDY OF HEART ATTACK PATIENTS
There was no study of human heart attack patients and the rats weren’t patients, the were “subjects.” I know Ingred Newkirk of PETA believes a rat, is a pig, is a dog, is a boy, but apparently, so do the headline writers at the San Jose Mercury News—at least when it comes to hyping embryonic stem cell research.
