Quiet News Day

Quiet News Day

Today is a quiet news day. No research articles, no political articles. The Columbia Missourian has a feature story about two people on opposite sides of the stem cell issue, and there are some generic articles about how stem cells work or what they could do that anyone who reads this blog probably already knows. (If you don’t, go to the NIH for much better coverage than you’d get from two paragraphs in a college newspaper, or check out some of the links on this site.) Some patent applications.

So, given that, I don’t have a lot to say. Even the other science news is slim on biology. I’ll check back in and update later if anything cool happens.

Fraudulent Stem Cell Stock Indictment

Fraudulent Stem Cell Stock Indictment

This is a business story in the Salt Lake Tribune and is not directly related to any research or treatment issues. The people who were victimized were investors, not patients. Three men were indicted by a grand jury yesterday on charges that they founded and sold stock for a company that they claimed was doing stem cell research. The indictments say that they had approximately 600 investors, mostly from overseas, and obtained $6.6 million from them. No stem cell research was conducted. One of the men is awaiting sentencing for securities fraud in New York, another man is “believed to be serving a prison sentence in Laos for a financial crime,” and the third is location unknown.

It’s no surprise that stem cell research would be a potential way to scam people, since it’s a new science with a lot of hype. One hopes people putting money have wised up a bit in the last few years.