Week 5 STAP cell poll: still largely skeptical readership

Update: A commenter said they’d prefer a different format to the graphing of these STAP cell poll results. Even though they weren’t exactly nice about it to put it mildly, I thought they had a good point so a hat tip to them and below is an attempt at a new graph style that makes seeing trends easier I hope.

Here is 5 weeks of tracking poll data on people’s feelings about STAP stem cells. It’s not scientific, but shows trends.

There was some leveling off of the severe skepticism of last week, but overall the  more than 500 respondents were still quite negative.

STAP5 new graph

The answer “100% NO” means convinced STAP is not real, while “100% Yes” was the opposite indicating complete belief. “Close NO” means closed to convinced STAP is not real. And so forth.

I’ll start a week 6 poll soon. Note that the “weekly” timing is a bit off on the polling as it has now been 6 weeks since the STAP papers came out.

4 thoughts on “Week 5 STAP cell poll: still largely skeptical readership”

  1. I left this comment on wrong page. I will rewrite here.

    Do you think STAP cells are the same as spore-like stem cells like Vacanti insists?

    They said,
    “Obokata worked with top stem cell scientists to show rigorously that these cells were triggered to return to a stem cell-like state by an environmental stress, such as being placed for 30 minutes in a mild acid bath.”
    -from The Boston Globe-

    It seems to me this is not what the Nature paper said. To me, if Vacanti is right, the Nature paper shouldn’t show TCR rearrangement. But they did. His claim is inconsistent. Do you think spore-like cells are also CD45+ cells? How do you think?

  2. We readers and you yourself are of course aware that these weekly snapshots are not scientific data.
    The decrease in confidence for example could mean that more skeptical readers landed on your blog compared to the initial polls.
    One way to extract more meaning would be information about how many participants, who took part at least twice, changed their minds as events unfolded. Maybe this information is collected somewhere , e.g. via IP-addresses of the voters?

    1. very good suggestion (multiple-poll participation).

      also, for both you & dr knoepfler: don’t you think it’s slightly strange that the number of “yes”es (neon and dark green) grew quite a bit? especially as more negative evidence has come to light?

      hmm.

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