The saga that was unleashed about South Korean cloning research continues. In fact, I don’t think it can get clearer than this. The following is taken from an article at Nature News.
The university committee looking into scientific misconduct in the laboratory of South Korean cloner Woo Suk Hwang announced on 10 January that his 2004 claim to have cloned a human embryo was fake. But his Afghan hound Snuppy is a real clone.
The announcement finally confirms the gravest suspicions of Hwang’s work with humans. There are two papers in which Hwang’s group claimed to clone human cells – a 2004 article that describes the first cloned embryo and derivation of a stem-cell line from it (W. S. Hwang et al. Science 303, 1669-1674; 2004), and a 2005 article that claims the establishment of eleven ‘patient-specific’ stem-cell lines (W. S. Hwang et al. Science 308, 1777-1783; 2005). Both have turned out to be complete and deliberate fakes.
What saddens me the most is the fact that those were deliberate fakes. Scientists have nothing to gain by faking their results, if only some passing fame and celebrity. But in a field where results have to be duplicated by at least another independant laboratory to get adopted, chances are high that you will get caught. It’s a complete disrespect for the scientific community and to the scientific method in general.
Moreover, this particular fraud deals with feelings and emotions regarding a field under many ethical questions, particularly the way he obtained the eggs on which he was working.
It is possible to create embryonic stem-cell lines, insists Kevin Eggan, a researcher in the field at Harvard University, Massachusetts. But no one will venture a guess as to when it might be accomplished. “There are many unknowns,” says Eggan. “We don’t know how many eggs will be needed and we don’t know how many women will step forward to contribute.”
Ethical transgressions in the way Hwang got his eggs – he seems to have coerced junior researchers into donating – have stimulated an international debate over how eggs should be obtained. Eggan expects to gain approval this spring to begin human stem-cell cloning research, and he says his group will follow the US National Academies’ guidelines. These stipulate that egg donors should receive no payment.
Bottom line: I hope that Woo Suk Hwang won’t be able to approach a laboratory ever again, as he proved to be guilty of the worst form of scientific crime: faking results and taking credit for them. While I’m not naïve and I doubt that this is the only case in the scientific community, I hope that the phenomenon is at least isolated, as it would be a shame if all research from South Korea was discredited because of one man.
January 10th, 2006 | General Science