Wrong Cell Lines Catastrophe in Cancer Research

It’s me that used the word catastrophe here; most doctors are talking of a minor glitch. But then most doctors and scientists are gullible or frauds. The fact that 100 scientific papers and 11 US patents are invalidated by the discovery that trials were done on the wrong type of cells is very major indeed.

Know what’s weird here? Hardly anybody is concerned. Doesn’t that say volumes for the fact that they don’t believe their own B*S* anyway? I think it does.

If you had the “latest drug” for pancreatic cancer, that was “proven” to work, but in fact had been tested only on lung cells or ovarian cancer, wouldn’t you worry… just a little?

Well, that’s what patients are now facing. It seems there has been a huge mix up and scientists supposedly doing research into cancer therapies have been testing out on any old cell line, not necessarily the one they claimed. In other words all the science is fraudulent and should be re-done, even if not an intentional mistake (no evidence of that).

The study which stirred all this up is a Dutch study (you’d never get this degree of honesty from an American study or researchers), showing that three of 13 human esophageal cancer cell lines widely used for worldwide research were actually cell lines from lung, colorectal and other malignancies.

Two of the contaminated or misidentified cell lines were involved in research published in more than 100 papers and in the issuance of 11 U.S. patents, which led to clinical trials in patients. Winand N.M. Dinjens, senior author of a short paper published online Jan. 14 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and head of molecular diagnostics in the department of pathology at the Josephine Nefkens Institute, University Medical Center Rotterdam in The Netherlands.

Predictably, “experts” are stating that the unintentional misidentification or contamination of the cell lines is not critical and is even a fairly common occurrence. Well, they would say that, woudn’t they, since they got egg all over their faces…

“From the scientific point of view, it’s not a huge deal, but it’s certainly something you’re glad you found out,” said Charles Saxe, scientific director of the Program in Cancer Cell Biology and Metastasis at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta [Yeah, I’ll bet he was real glad]. “This probably doesn’t surprise anybody. The surprise is probably that there were only three.”

The unpleasant surprise for the rest of us, Mr. Saxe, is that you seem to play down mistakes of this order, yet belong to a lobby which wants to jail honest holistic practitioners for staking out part of your money-grabbing territory with something a little less twisted (Saxe works for the corrupt charity known as the American Cancer Society; most countries have a version of this “cancer charity” scam).

“The issue of misidentification/crosscontamination is not a new thing,” said Robert H. Shoemaker, chief of the screening technologies branch at the U.S. National Cancer Institute and author of an editorial accompanying the study, who also did not deem the finding a huge catastrophe.

What? A kid in 2nd or 3rd grade who turned in such sloppy work would be punished by the teacher. If you got an assignment to write about European history and wrote instead about Japanese history, you’d get whalloped— and expect to be, right?

Notice that my concern here is not that this happened or that there was contamination: it’s that nobody in responsible positions seems to give a damn.

It shows just what cycnicism and phoney science is out there. It’s not science: it’s pre-packaging drugs for sale to an unsupecting public.

SOURCE: Jan. 14, 2010, online Journal of the National Cancer Institute; comments from www.medicine.net