>I listened for over a decade while scientists who were supposedly 'highly trained' offered all sorts of false hope on cures for AIDS and other cancers. They were often proven to be wrong.
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>You could say the same about speech-to-text, natural language processing, air transport and clean energy sources. Sometimes stuff turns out harder than anybody expected. That's why physicians want to see proper peer-reviewed studies. Otherwise it's too easy for passion, anecdote and fixed belief to take the place of reasonable certainty. That used to happen quite a lot in medicine: for example, after a Royal scion had a tonsillectomy last century, it became a popular procedure for kids for whom it was completely unnecessary. The public, the media and medicine joined forces to create what Cohen and Rothschild called one of the great "Bandwagons of Medicine" in which children lost their lives having unnecessary operations. Physicians would like to think that internal and external research prevents bandwagons these days, unlike alternative practitioners who can and do claim all sorts of cures without merit.
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>Yes, the issues on animal tissue (and things like stem cell research) bug the living hell out of me.
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>Elliott is using islet cells from a colony of pigs rescued from a remote subantarctic island where they were abandoned by sealers 200 years ago. No, I'm not joking. ;-)


Uh, what is subantarctic?

I do foresee one possible side effect from the implantation of pig cells -- oinking.