Slashdot Mirror
Korean Lab Worker Forced to Donate Her Own Eggs
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang had attained international fame by successfully cloning a human embryo, but he accomplished his feat by pressuring a lab worker into donating her own eggs. Consequently, Gerald Schatten, a cell biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, has severed his ties with Mr. Hwang and cited gross breaches of ethics."
I don't see anything in TFA about coercion ... where did that part come from?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
A quick glance at the article shows it happened at Seoul University which is in South Korea. Last I heard, South Korea hadn't been overrun by the communists from the north.
Got Shadowrun? Awakened Worlds
"Dr. Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul University."
North Korea doesn't have the money, the technology, or the support necessary for stem cell research.
eclecti.cc
If the article is all there to go on, it is sensationalist.
I see nothing over coercion:
"Dr. Schatten, who was to have led the organization's board of directors, says he is now severing collaboration with Dr. Hwang, due to questions over the source of human eggs used in a 2004 cloning project, and errors in a 2005 paper coauthored by the scientists.
A 2004 news report in the journal Nature said at least one female laboratory worker had provided eggs for the project, an allegation that Dr. Hwang has denied on several occasions. Under U.S. rules, collecting eggs from women working on a cloning project would be considered unethical. In the original paper, published by the journal Science last year, the scientists said the eggs all came from anonymous donors."
Nothing about pressuring? Where are you getting that from, ScuttleMonkey, and do the /. editors RTFA's themselves?
"According to the WSJ" Schatten quit because he heard that one of the lab workers had donated eggs, but there is nothign about pressure in the WSJ article. Is there in the Nature one?
Typical misrepresentation of the facts by the submitter.
No where in the linked article was there any impliation that Dr. Hwang used any form of pressure, coersion, or other unscrupulous means to obtain the eggs.
The reasons given by Mr. Schatten is pretty clearly stated:
Under U.S. rules, collecting eggs from women working on a cloning project would be considered unethical. In the original paper, published by the journal Science last year, the scientists said the eggs all came from anonymous donors.
Hwang lied about where the eggs came from, and used (from the standpoint of the US) and inappropriate donor.
I know this is just user submitted stuff here, but could we at leat pretend like accurately representing the article is important. Or do we just assume no one will bother to read a 1/2 summary without some creative spin in the summary.
Pulled from Science, Vol 304, Issue 5673, 945 , 14 May 2004:
Last week Nature reported that in an interview a member of the research team admitted being one of the egg donors, raising questions about whether she profited professionally by being a co-author. Nature quoted bioethicists as saying that, to avoid any hint of coercion, there should be an arms-length relationship between the research group and the donors.
Hwang blames the language barrier for "a miscommunication." He says the woman had tried to explain that, in the future, she would be willing to donate eggs for such research by other groups. Moon-il Park, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Hanyang University in Seoul and chair of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the university hospital that approved the research plan--the eggs were harvested at the hospital--wrote in an e-mail that no one from Hwang's team was among the 16 volunteers. "I confirmed this after being contacted by Professor Hwang" regarding the allegations, he wrote.
Where did anyone other than this slashdot submitter accuse Dr.Hwang of forcing anyone?
On the contrary, Dr.Hwang is well known for being exceptionally careful to keep his experiements in ethical domain, even at the expense of progresses in his experiments. Please examine the facts first before making a serious accusation like this
Read the article, it says nothing about pressuring anyone about eggs, whoever wrote the blurb should be punished, they obviously have a political axe to grind against human cloning. The sad part is that most people who see this will believe this guy coerced a employee to donate an egg blindly without reading the story first...READ THE ARTICLE AND TELL ME WHERE IT SAYS HE "PRESSURED" HIS ASSITANT FOR EGGS! It doesnt, it says he misrepresented where the eggs came from, period. So for everyone who is all outraged about this, go to the article and read it before you start venting out of control.
Schatten believed Huang's denials. He now has information that makes him doubt those denials. He's figured out that his colleague has been lying to his face for over a year. That's not evidence of being ok with forced egg donations/harvesting.
Such situations between superiors and subordinates are inherently coercive. Even if the superior adamantly claims that he won't take the refusal into account when considering promotions, raises, recommendations, etc. there's absolutely no way to assure that. Moreover, even if the superior genuinely won't hold it against the subordinate, the subordinate could still feel as though he's being coerced.
This is why, in these situations, it is assumed that coercion would occur, and the situation is therefore forbidden without exception.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
6 hours past, in the meantime two more BS postings from ScuttleMonkey, but neither an update nor an apology by ScuttleMonkey and the author of the article! Posting false accusations and playing with a researcher's reputation is the only unethical misdeed here.