[tokenadult]

Here is commentary from the group blog by science journalists Retraction Watch on this story, "Co-author of controversial acid STAP stem cell papers in Nature requests retraction: report":

http://retractionwatch.com/2014/03/10/co-author-of-controver...

Stem cell research is a "hot" research area, because it can be hyped as a cure-all, so we should all be especially skeptical of initial reports on new stem cell research. In general, we have to distinguish submissions to Hacker News based on press releases (there are way too many of those) from review articles by experienced researchers that digest the primary research done by a variety of researchers around the world. The latter kind of submission (a review article from a peer-reviewed journal or a book chapter from a practitioner's handbook) would be an excellent submission to Hacker News if it has a link that lives online for free reading, but it would also mean reading something longer than something that can be summed up with a one-line lt;dr summary. Otherwise, a thoughtful article by a science journalist who interviews scientists besides the scientists hyping a new discovery can be much better than a new "peer-reviewed" preliminary research finding. All too often, in our haste for "news" here about medical research, all the hackers here can be led astray about what is really established knowledge in medicine.

[frozenport]

This isn't correct, consider that the whole scientific community was excited about this paper. And why not? It was published in a good journal and there are a few people trying similar methods.

Could be big if it works, although not sure it is HN content as opposed to some biology community.