Acid-bath stem-cell study under investigation

Article about the study: http://www.nature.com/news/acid-bath-offers-easy-path-to-ste...

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7143630

My wife works in cell biology and worked with stem cells for the last several years. Differentiation protocols are very difficult. She was working on turning IPS cells into lung epithelial cells so she could study the effects of CFTR malfunction with genetically matched control cells.

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.

I don't know a lot about biology, but I do know a lot about proofs, provenance, zero-knowledge, etc. I wonder if there is some way, in an experiment of this kind, to tell whether the embryonic stem cells obtained are "really" derived from an adult mouse, as opposed to being extracted from an ordinary mouse embryo. In that case, third parties could verify the claim just by looking at the cell cultures. But I assume that they are actually completely normal-looking, as this is the point of the protocol.

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?

What about credible results- should things require less evidence if they support the status quo?

> What about credible results- should things require less evidence if they support the status quo?

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.