Previous Post: Paging the SEC: Investigate Advanced Cell Technology

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Note: This post originally appeared at 8:25 this morning.
It will be kept at the top for the rest of Monday.

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Opponents of life-destroying Embryonic Stem Cell Research (ESCR) have vocally spoken out about both the legitimacy and purported moral acceptability of the research claims made by Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. (ACT) in its announcement last week that it had “Generate(d) Human Embryonic Stem Cells that Maintains Developmental Potential of (the) Embryo.”

Objections from the Catholic Church and the prolife community might be seen by some to have been predictable. But that doesn’t explain why pro-ESCR scientists are also blasting ACT’s work and its claims.

From Life News (links within excerpt were added by me):

Catholic Church, Scientists Say New Embryonic Stem Cell Research Claims False

In a rare agreement on the thorny issue of embryonic stem cell research, the Catholic Church and scientists who back the destructive research both agree that a California biotech firm’s claims of creating a new method of obtaining embryonic stem cells without taking human life are false.

Art Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the top embryonic stem cell research advocates in the United States, called the claims “all hype.”

Advanced Cell Technology published a paper last week in the journal Nature claiming to have used the single-cell biopsy technique called Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) to obtain stem cells from 16 human embryos. However, further examination shows all 16 of the days-old unborn children died in the process.

“The science involved is not going to lead to any sort of ethical breakthrough,” Caplan wrote in an op-ed over the weekend.

Caplan said the cells ACT obtained may not act like embryonic stem cells obtained by the traditional method of killing human embryos. He also said couples would be reluctant to donate human embryos for the research and that the cells may only come from embryos with physical handicaps.

“Ultimately this so-called ‘breakthrough’ does little to quiet the critics of embryo destruction or the proponents of stem cell research using human embryos, such as myself,” he explained.
“What we have here is hype, not hope,” he added.

Top Stanford University researcher Hank Greely agreed.

“From the scientific perspective, never believe anything until it’s replicated several times,” he said. “It will be interesting and important to see if these cells turn out to be the same kind of cells with the same kind of promise as [embryonic] stem cells derived [traditionally].”

We can also add people with some knowledge of the investment community and the ESCR industry to those who don’t believe that ACT has accomplished anything significant. ACT was discussed on last Thursday’s public radio program “Marketplace,” (ram-format audio is at link). This is a program that I am nearly certain airs AFTER the markets close. Assuming I’m correct, following a day in which ACT shares opened at $2.30 and closed at $1.60, a fall over 30% over the course of one trading day, ethicist Glen McGee and Tufts University’s Jan Reichert both expressed severe reservations about the company’s claims:

CLENN MCGEE: Investors just aren’t buying it. I mean they don’t believe this kind of discovery is going to set Advanced Cell Technologies apart and they shouldn’t.

HELEN PALMER (Marketplace reporter): Jan Reichert of Tufts University says ethical issues aren’t the only problem. Stem cell therapy just isn’t ready for prime time.

JAN REICHERT: It’s not being picked up either by biotech or by the major pharmaceutical firms simply because the end use of them is not quite clear yet.

PALMER: Reichert says stem cells need five more years of basic research before venture capitalists will see enough returns in therapies and dollars to tempt them to invest.

Hmm. Somebody DID invest on Friday, two days after ACT’s announcement. Were they fooled?

And a whole lot of people must have thought that the “discovery” would “set ACT apart” on Wednesday (and maybe Tuesday, based on the day-before share price jump of over 50%), only to see the walls come tumbling down on Thursday and Friday (NASDAQ link is here; chart will change when the markets open on Monday):

According to NASDAQ’s web site, ACT has 27.7 million shares outstanding. Note that Wednesday’s, Thursday’s, and Friday’s trading volumes were 32%, 56%, and 36% of the company’s outstanding shares. The company’s 10/31/05 Proxy Statement (PDF; go to Page 5) shows that at that time, officers and directors of the company owned 22% of the company, and fund companies owned another 51%.

The chances that there is something fundamentally not right about all of this, and that financiers and/or public shareholders have been snookered, have to be seen as more than minor. The charges against ACT are not just coming from supposed moral puritans; they’re coming from just about anyone who invests a minimal amount of time looking into what’s being claimed vs. what has really been accomplished.

As I wrote Saturday:

If you think there’s more than a little reason to suspect that the investment funds, the officers, and/or the directors of ATC may have made a financial killing as a result of manufactured (and if Smith is right, now thoroughly punctured) hype at the possible expense of unjustifiably overexcited individual investors — well, so do I.

Earth to SEC: Investigate ACT. You might even consider having someone watch the airports and the borders.

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UPDATE: ACT stock (symbol ACTC) closed at 89 cents on Monday, down 7 cents, or 7.3%. Tuesday’s close: 86 cents. Wednesday at noon: 80 cents. Wednesday’s Close: 78 cents (a 3-day, 18.75% haircut).

UPDATE 2, Sept. 7: Michael Fumento gets in his rips, and they’re good ones:

For all the media mania, you’d never know the Lanza publication was just a 200-word letter that spent as much verbiage on theory as actually describing the experiment. As such, Nature had no business running it.

But as I’ve written elsewhere, Nature has long boosted embryonic stem cell (ESC) technology generally and the lifting of federal funding restrictions specifically, as has its American counterpart Science. Their eagerness to run anything promoting this view recently led to Science being forced to withdraw not one but two “ESC miracle breakthrough” articles.

The fact that Wal-Mart has done what follows isn’t what is significant. It’s the fact that company management felt they had to blast their trumpets to the world about it:

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AdAge.com) — In an unprecedented push, Wal-Mart Stores has hired a gay-marketing shop, joined the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and begun discussions with activist groups about extending domestic-partnership benefits to its employees.

The belief in the executive suites in Bentonville must be, “Let’s join some big gay organization and make nice about domestic-partner benefits, and maybe everyone will leave us alone.”

No. They won’t.

I also don’t see how the company will be able to simultaneously absorb the cost of extending domestic-partnership benefits to gay and straight couples AND improve the overall health-care coverage setup it is so derided for.

Does anyone think the UFCW will back off because domestic partners have access to what the union sees as totally inadequate health benefits?

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UPDATE: A story in the Dayton Daily News (does not require registration at the moment) has the news, and all of the predictable reactions.

UPDATE 2: In a Washington Post op-ed today, Sebastian Mallaby wraps it up (HT Right Angle Blog) by saying –

For a party that needs the votes of Wal-Mart’s customers, this is a questionable strategy. But there is more than politics at stake. According to a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Jerry Hausman and Ephraim Leibtag, neither of whom received funding from Wal-Mart, big-box stores led by Wal-Mart reduce families’ food bills by one-fourth. Because Wal-Mart’s price-cutting also has a big impact on the non-food stuff it peddles, it saves U.S. consumers upward of $200 billion a year, making it a larger booster of family welfare than the federal government’s $33 billion food-stamp program.

How can centrist Democrats respond to that? By beating up Wal-Mart and forcing it to focus on public relations rather than opening new stores, Democrats are harming the poor Americans they claim to speak for.

My message to Wal-Mart would be: Please don’t allow them to lead you into screwing it up. There’s every sign that this is exactly what you’re doing.

A subscription-only Wall Street Journal editorial recounts a history that bears repeating:

By the time it finally passed in Washington, the concept had been percolating in the states going back at least 30 years to Ronald Reagan’s tenure as California Governor. The Gipper took his ideas to Washington, proposing a work requirement, among others things. His 1986 proposal, “Up From Dependency,” was offered too late in his term to pass a Democratic Senate, but it advanced the debate.

Reform really took off in the early 1990s as Governors, led by Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson, took the initiative. They battled for waivers from the feds, and then one of their own, Mr. Clinton, decided to run for the White House in 1992 using welfare reform as a way of proving his New Democrat bona fides.

He quickly shelved the idea in his first two years, bowing to a Democratic Congress. But when Republicans won the House in 1994, they made it one of their priorities. Mr. Clinton declared this week that the bill he signed was a “bipartisan” triumph, and in a narrow sense it was. But 98 Democrats opposed him on the House floor, including many of the Democrats who would chair committees in the House if they re-take Congress in November. Mr. Clinton also vetoed reform twice before finally signing it in 1996 after his political guru Dick Morris told him it was the one issue that could cost him re-election. Make no mistake: This was a conservative reform opposed every step of the way by the political left and its media allies.

Plenty has been written about what the Gingrich Revolution did or didn’t do, but no one can take away from it the fact that it finished the job of passing welfare reform by backing the opposition’s president into a corner and forcing him, while kicking and screaming, to do what he had to do to maintain his electoral viability.

According to World Net Daily (HT to an e-mailer), Ebay is treating homeschoolers like crooks, lumping in homeschool texts with illegal drugs and bootleg recordings.
If so, add Ebay to two lists:

• High-tech and Internet companies, many of whom are on BizzyBlog’s Internet Wall of Shame, with an inherent animus against free thought and expression.
• Supporters of “net neutrality” legislation (which BizzyBlog opposes). In Ebay’s case, it actively solicits support for that effort from members.

Coincidence? I think not.

One reason is because no one will want to try to pronounce Khabibullo Abdusamatov’s name at introductions.

But the bigger reason is that he thinks we’re heading into an era of global ….. cooling (HT Kim at Wizbang), who also caught an article about how glaciers in the Himalayas are growing:

Russian scientist predicts global cooling
MOSCOW, Aug. 25 (UPI) — A Russian scientist predicts a period of global cooling in coming decades, followed by a warmer interval.

Abdusamatov and his colleagues at the Russian Academy of Sciences astronomical observatory said the prediction is based on measurement of solar emissions, Novosti reported. They expect the cooling to begin within a few years and to reach its peak between 2055 and 2060.

“The Kyoto initiatives to save the planet from the greenhouse effect should be put off until better times,” he said. “The global temperature maximum has been reached on Earth, and Earth’s global temperature will decline to a climatic minimum even without the Kyoto protocol.”

That’s a trifecta: global cooling instead of warming, no need for Kyoto, and no assignment of any blame to humanity. I hope Mr. Abdusamatov likes it over there in Russia.

Their dollar volume is over eight times the level last year (and I think last year’s reported level is the full-year amount.

But though it has been specifically stated in a few deals, this Reuters report says nothing about how the additional expenses and management time involved in complying with Sarbanes Oxley at public companies has helped that happen.

The Good News (HT Interested-Participant):

A man from the Dallas area – 4,590 miles away – contacted police in the northern English town early Tuesday morning (Liverpool time) to report a burglary in progress. The international cyber sleuth was watching a webcam broadcast of Mathew Street in the famed Beatles quarter when he spotted three men breaking into a sporting goods store.

City officials trained on-street cameras on the site as the blaggers bolted with thousands of dollars in clothing toward a getaway car. Bobbies dashed to the scene and arrested them “fairly sharpish,” city officials said.

The incident made the front page Friday in the Liverpool Echo newspaper. In the article, headlined “Nicked on the Net,” a police inspector told reporter Luke Traynor: “We were amazed when we were informed the person who reported the offence lived in the USA.”

Police caught the crooks, but they didn’t catch the tipster’s name.

The Bad News, as I-P notes:

….. police officers in Liverpool weren’t monitoring the surveillance cameras. In most cases, I believe that surveillance camera footage provides evidence to convict criminals rather than to catch them in the act. Simple manpower constraints make it so.

Despite this unique success, it shows that cameras, despite being sold to city governments as crime prevention devices, are usually at best after-the fact detective measures that can be foiled if they aren’t pointed in the right direction, or if criminals are smart enough to wear masks and to take other concealment measures.