As I have deconstructed the great ACT deception about its embryonic stem cell experiment, I have worked off the following assumptions: The paper published in Nature was bonafide, but that the PR that ACT attempted to generate about its experiment was profoundly misleading, as was Nature’s initial press release. The media, wanting desperately to undermine President Bush’s ESCR funding policy, took one look at the releases and were off and running without reading the actual paper.
This was different from the Hwang cloning fraud, I have stated in numerous radio interviews, because Lanza did not write a fraudulent paper, but misled the public about what was actually in the paper. In contrast, Hwang engaged in fraud up and down the line.
But now, it seems that Lanza may have left crucial data out of the Nature paper itself that would have undermined the premise that ACT’s “technique” could create ES cell lines from single cells without destroying the embryo. If so, should Lanza and ACT ever be permitted to publish in prestigious journals again? And will the media finally learn that “the scientists” cannot necessarily be trusted to tell them the objective truth?
HT—AJOB blog.
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