Being British, I have a certain reverence for the BBC, which was arguably at some point in history the finest news organization in the world. That’s certainly no longer the case, especially in science reporting.
Being a cardiac biologist, my interest was piqued by the following headline… “Mini hearts grown to study disease“, but the story itself is less actual science reporting, and more lab/university PR. Such material does not science news make. A better headline would be “Dude from obscure Scottish university figures out how to do something already done“.
The first red flag that this news piece is nothing more than PR, is no link to a report of the underlying science in a peer reviewed journal. The most fundamental bar for something being newsworthy in science is journal publication. How did this even get past the BBC proof readers?
Well, maybe the link to the authors’ University webpage* can help? (oddly it was put at the bottom of the piece, not embedded in the text of the article itself). Nope, nothing about cardiac stem cells there.**
What about PubMed? Nope. 5 papers published since 2007, none of them about hearts.
Then there’s this statement… “They are indeed human cells, which physiologically are the same as human hearts, in this case the size does not matter”. Ever heard of pre-load? Afterload? Frank-Starling? Oxygen tension? Does anyone in the BBC science department even understand the meaning of the word “physiology”? Resisting my temptation to make a puerile joke that size DOES matter, let’s just say a ball of cells is about as far removed from a living beating human heart, as a naked mole rat penis.
The kicker is this tag-line at the end… “We can work now, in one experiment, with 1,000 human hearts and test large amounts of compounds, which you can’t do in animals”. While ignoring that you actually CAN do this in animals (you just need 1000 animals, which isn’t a lot for a mouse lab), the key word here is “now”. NOW we can do this. Before we couldn’t do this. Everything hinges on novelty, but as the link above to the pioneering work of Chuck Murry shows (as does a quick search for “heart on a chip”), this is far from novel.
None of the above is to detract from the actual work of Dr. Zhelev. I’ve never met him, and his work is probably awesome. Hey, he got cardiac stem cells to grow in a dish, which is more than I’ve ever done with stem cells, so hats off to him! But please BBC science news, try and recognize when you’re being used for blatant PR with zero underlying content. As a scientist, I like a little more meat behind my science reading.
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*Who even knew there was such a thing as the University of Abertay? I come from the other end of the Sceptred Isle and had never heard of it before. I’m sure it’s a great place, but maybe someone in their science PR office needs to lay off the caffeine for a while.
**Lordy! Those are some freaky cold lookin’ folks at the top of the page. The dude in the middle looks like he just got out of a knife fight. That one with the big eye in the magnifier is giving me the fear!