Not since researchers found male DNA in the brains of mothers have we had a story as stunning as this: Brain cells made from urine! Sounds like a made-for-Jon-Stewart discovery.
That's how the headlines read on Monya Baker's story for Nature and a story by Tia Ghose at LiveScience. If it sounds a bit too good to be true–it is.
We can't blame Baker for the headline, and she was more careful in her lede, where she wrote that scientists have not turned urine into brain cells, but instead have turned certain "cells discarded in human urine" into what are called neural progenitor cells. Turning one kind of cell into another is a little easier to believe than turning urine into cells. Ghose was not quite as careful. "Scientists have made brain cells from pee," she begins. She recovers quickly in the next sentence, noting that she's talking about skin cells shed by the kidney, not, you know, "pee." Still, the damage was done.
I also wondered whether it was fair to say that the researchers made brain cells, when what they report in their abstract is that they reprogrammed "epithelial-like cells" from the kidney into neural progenitor cells. Are those brain cells? The researchers say they survived and differentiated when injected into newborn rat brains, so I guess it's fair to call them brain cells.
The lesson here? Taking a little shortcut in language can make for a better-sounding story–but not a better story.
-Paul Raeburn
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