EPThttp://www.jci.org/articles/view/32959
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7213/full/nature07314.html
While the title that tempted you -- tricked you, rather -- into opening this blog was accurate in a very loose and perhaps disingenuous sense, it is in no way reflective of what you thought it might lead into: that diabetes has truly been cured in people. Here you probably did not really expect to learn that diabetes has been cured, as you would have surely heard about it prior to clicking this blog post...but you did at least expect to find a heap of horribly suspicious information claiming to have found a true human cure ready for use in a clinical setting, based on that purposefully misleading title.
The real title of this blog post should actually be something more along the lines of... Be Wary of Catchy Science Headlines.
I really want to focus on the word "WARY" here. The admonition is not to suggest that the content behind such sensationalist titles should be ignored, which in my eyes would be to jump to the other extreme: from sensational excitement over something that is overblown to complete rejection over distrust and suspicion.
It turns out that completely rejecting this news after learning the title was a fib concocted only to draw in readers would prevent you from learning the real story, and more importantly the real implications on human health. It so happens that investigators are taking the approach defined in mouse and figuring out how to apply it as a regenerative medicine for humans, although at this point the work is limited primarily to in-vitro (i.e. not within the environment of a living organism) cell studies, in addition to growing understanding of cell signaling and tissue specific cell differentiation (i.e. one cell type specializing into another):
http://journals.lww.com/co-endocrinology/pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=2013&issue=02000&article=00002&type=abstract
http://dev.biologists.org/content/140/12/2472.long
In conclusion, the next time you run across a seemingly sensational-sounding title reported in media in a frenzy of hype, bear in mind that titles are often misleading -- especially when the topic is "hot" and attention is easy to garner. That being said, bear in mind that more often than not there is truth within the content behind that title. At the very least, it is worth it to explore what is behind the title. The best way to go about this is rather than reading about the finding in a media article, going straight to the original journal article and reading that, followed by the related commentaries or responses by other peers in that field.
