Thursday, October 04, 2007

Cha and Burnham not getting CIRM grants

Terri Somers' article begins: The check is not in the mail for La Jolla's Burnham Institute or the CHA Regenerative Medicine Institute of Los Angeles.

Somers wrote of Cha:

The CHA Regenerative Medicine Institute of Los Angeles has withdrawn its application for grant money, said Arlene Chiu, chief scientific officer of the state stem cell institute.

The CHA researchers in Los Angeles wanted funding to make customized nerve cells from patients with Lou Gehrig's disease using human embryonic stem cell lines and a cloning method known as somatic cell nuclear transfer.

The initial approval of CHA's grant request was immediately questioned by taxpayer advocacy groups because of the facility's close ties with a for-profit Korean parent company, CHA Health Systems.


Somers did not bring out that what Cha proposed to do (human SCNT) was what Hwang Woo Suk falsely claimed to have done. Somers also does NOT mention previous connections between Cha and Hwang (The Scientist blog: Flamm says that Hwang and Cha have collaborated on previous work, and their names appear together on "at least five published studies." These points were also NOT made on californiastemcellreport.


Somers does NOT use the word plagiarism in writing: Meanwhile, CHA's CEO, Kwang Yul Cha, has come under fire as a co-author on a scientific paper that some critics say was identical to one published in a Korean journal. Cha denies any wrongdoing.

Somers does NOT mention that Cha threatened to sue both the editor of Fertility & Sterility (and F&S, etc.) AND the Los Angeles Times for defamation over the plagiarism business. F&S issued an apology/retraction.

Somers does NOT mention that Cha DID SUE Bruce Flamm for defamation for Flamm's actions, mostly related to the prayer/IVF paper which appeared in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine.

You could steer the ship formerly known as the Exxon Valdez through the gaps in the writing of Terri Somers.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home