[Tzela]

I did my PhD in cell biology a few years ago and I am seriously sceptical about the Kickstarter campaign. There are too many questions and way too few control experiments. What you can see about their preliminary research is the rotation device and the pictures of the cells. From what I have learned during my studies is that it is easy to kill cell cultures and it is difficult to compare different cell lines. For example, most cells need a very controlled environment (temperature, growth medium, pH, a specific amount of cells per area and not too many or too few neighbouring cells etc.) This rotation device appears to be at room temperature and creates a shear flow, which is enough to kill most cell cultures. The picture they show is not helpful at all, as they just show dying cells. As others stated: you need more control experiments. One would be to keekp a bottle of cells in the machine, without rotation. That's really cheap and easy to compare, which they did not. (not addressing the issue that that's not real microgravity) I hope to find time later to find their publications, until then I don't believe this to be real.

Edit: I cannot find anything that's even looking like research. News articles all referring Chou, but nothing to show for it. No paper or data. Now it looks even worse.

[z92]

I thought any of these experiments are carried out on two sets of cells. One normal and the other cancerous. Both exposed to the same test environment and treatment -- shear in this case. And when they claim "70% of cancerous cells died" they mean 70% more of the cancerous cells died than that of the normal cells, where "more" is defined in some acceptable standard.

[Tzela]

Yes, but it is not what they say or show. And as long as they don't publish anything more you should be far more sceptical than those journalists were.

[vanderZwan]

> From what I have learned during my studies is that it is easy to kill cell cultures

The linked article mentions:

> only at zero-gravity do cells die via "programmed cell death"

Isn't triggering apoptosis a little different than not being able to keep cells alive?

Of course, this changes nothing about your other points - there are a lot of fishy things going on here

[Tzela]

It is, but you'd need to verify the difference somehow, with fluorescent markers for example. But they appear to have only counted the surviving cells.

[vanderZwan]

... ok so they have an unverified claim of apoptosis too? Yikes, that just makes it worse!

[blattimwind]

> it is easy to kill cell cultures

https://xkcd.com/1217/

[close04]

In unrelated news, some of world's billionaires move to LEO.

[paulcole]

SR Hadden has entered the chat.