Neither Minger nor
Newsweek nor Wade could be more wrong. As
Atala told PBS’s Online NewsHour, “
We have been able to drive the cell to what we call all three germ layers,** which basically means all three major classes of tissues available in the body**, from which all cells come from.” I pointed out in a response to the
New York Times posting that merely reading the online abstract of the Atala paper indicated the same. Of course, this is the same paper that
told readers in 2004 that there were
no cures or treatments with adult stem cells. Not 70 cures or treatments, some dating back half a century –
none.
It is neither paranoia nor exaggeration to say that the
New York Times is engaged in a stem-cell cover-up.
What makes all of this worse is that Atala’s work actually is a replication of numerous studies. He’s just taken the research further and pulled his cells from amniotic fluid, whereas others have pulled the identical cells from the placenta. Amniotic and placenta stem cells are the same, as Atala himself
noted. And as to human trials being “many years away,” *Newsweek *is correct only if “years away” means “years ago.” The
New England Journal of Medicine carried one paper on a placenta stem cell trial back in 1996 and another paper two years later. There’s been
one ongoing clinical trial since 2001 to treat sickle cell anemia…
