Acid-bath stem-cell study under investigation
nature.com
nature.com
The differentiation protocol she was trying to replicate is several month long protocol. Because each cell line has unique properties protocols must be "optimized" for each line before it will work. She ended up switching to primary lung epithelial cells for her experiments because the differentiation protocol was too difficult to replicate.
I guess my point is cell biology is very tricky and stem cell biology seems (from an outside perspective) to be even trickier. However, that isn't a reason not to be sceptical -- it just means it may take some time to really answer the question of whether or not this acid bath protocol works.
HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7143630
Not really. Science is by its very nature subversive, and as many Nobels have been awarded for work that falsified the status quo as confirmed it.
When the Michelson-Morley experiment falsified the luminiferous ether, much of physics fell into limbo (without a credible "status quo"), until Einstein's relativity theory offered an alternative explanation for electromagnetic propagation. But Einstein's proposal was met with incredulity until very good evidence confirmed it. That's science at its best -- perpetual doubt and skepticism.
That of course can be very different to the cultural status quo.
Yes, that's true, but to call a falsifiable theory a status quo is to imply that it represents an anchor, a stabilizing influence, rather than a tempting moving target for skeptical scientists, its true role.
Not in science. The problem with accepting credible results is that they may create an atmosphere of credibility where none really exists, and over time become the status quo without any real basis.
There are any number of stories in science where an expected value was reliably detected in a replication only because it was expected, and later, after the expected value changed, so did the replication results.
Remember that, in science, the null hypothesis is the default position -- in other words, there's no effect until persuasive evidence contradicts that assumption.
Otherwise, perhaps it is possible for the provenance to be deliberately marked in some way that is resistant to forgery. For example, the adult cells used could be provided by some independent source who is generally trusted not to "leak" the corresponding embryonic cells. Then, if you produce ESCs with the right genome (which is easy to test), you must have done it using adult cells alone. If a clever and unscrupulous biologist could forge that - say by taking a normal ESC and injecting foreign genetic material, or by cloning the mouse and harvesting the new embryo - then perhaps some alternative marker could be devised. It would have to be something that could be introduced into the adult mouse cells, but couldn't be easily extracted, swamped by a new marker, or transferred in the cloning process. Or we could cross-check against other signs that those methods might have been used - some biological equivalent of tamper-evidence, maybe?