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.
Man. What a fucking cheapskate. Eggs are like, what, $1.29 a dozen?
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
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
I think you grossly misunderstand Communism. Communism is not the same thing as fascism, authoritarianism, or anything along those lines. In fact, it's not a governmental so much as an economic system. I'm not advocating it, all evidence shows that Communism does not work. Nevertheless, it is not "evil." If you take the word "communist" out of the above post, it'll work fine.
Le français vous intéresse?
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."
Dr. X: I love you. I love your eggs. I promise not to slap you anymore. No fork them over bitch, I GOT SHIT TO CLONE.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
Questionable ethics from somebody working towards human cloning?
Why doesn't this surprise me?
I don't know. Prejudice maybe?
If this was a comic book, he'd probably gain superhuman powers from some weird lab accident and be called The Kloner.
Dr. Who suck wang...
Dr. Woo Suk Hwang
"Dr. Who" suck wang?
or
Dr. whom sucks wang?
Interesting indeed.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I would say something about having egg on his face, but I don't really think it's appropriate.
Now the poor chaps who are trying to achieve something worthwhile with their medical science using stem cells or whatnot have to deal with another round of "oh god, what is the world coming to?" And "quick! Lets ban the whole lot before someone else does something this stupid."
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.
What the submitter left out was this nice bit:
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.
Is it just me, or does it look like Schatten didn't have a problem with the forced collection, only starting to sever ties (note the tense there: "is now severing", ie, he hasn't finished?) after problems come up with a paper?
I can't see why else he waited a year after it was public knowledge (and no doubt knowledge to him well before the news report) to sever his ties.
Please help metamoderate.
They have exhausted their other options when it comes to delaying embryonig stem-cell research.
Since several states have started passing budgets with money dedicated to embryonic stem cell research, its oponents have been growing increasingly rabid and vicious in the last few months. The 3B dollars approved under proposition 71 in California have been delayed so far for more than a year. Expect those well-meaning folk trying to save your soul at the expense of your body to jump on this news and integrate it in their propaganda machine ASAP.
If you are subscribed to the google news feed on the topic ("stem cell" or "stem cells" are good candidate strings (does that thing take regexp btw?)) you will see that almost every week a major new scientific announcement is made. There are signs of improvement for a lot of diseases previously thought incurable. Not all of this stuff gets mentioned in the mainstream media in the US.
Don't go silently into that peaceful night
a columnist during the past election cycle quoted her child as having said to her 'John Kerry wants to make medicine out of babies.'
I remember that. And right after that, my 1-year-old son put down his Tonka truck and asked, "Daddy, why do columnists make up bad propaganda lines and then pretend their kid said it to make up for the fact that if an adult said it, he'd look really, really dumb?" Then he burped up on himself.
Actually, that was (is) *his* name, not hers.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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.
Subvocalize this phoenetically. Dok-tur Wu Saugk Hwahng. The 'h' sound consonant is actually a part of the surname "Hwang" but the it is not a part of the Wu portion of his first name.
It's not really rational to misread something then exclaim that anyone is kidding you. If anyone, it's your dyslexic inner adolescent that is kidding you.
--
"pain is weakness leaving the body."I agree with parent. Its kinda sad that Communism itself has become so associated with being 'evil', mostly I suppose because of the anti-Soviet rehetoric of the US Govornment, which i suppose was necessary at the time.
:o(
Oh, BTW absolute Capitalism doesnt work either. See USA for details
People confuse the utterly vile evil of Stalin & Mao with the Communist ideals, which are pretty benign and were designed to create an equal society. Mao (who was an order of magniture more dispicable than stalin) & co. abused these ideals for personal gain as soon as they took power.
In the end, communism doesnt really work in the real world because of human nature. Power corrputs, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Shame
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
As an eminent member of the NKKSU (North Korean Kraeizy Scientist Union), I see absolutely no problem with such practices. I myself regularly force my own lab slav^H^H^H^Hworkers to do such things. Those bastards are so lazy anyway that this is the only way to justify their outrageously high wages. No later than yesterday one of them even asked me a raise to $3.75 per hour. What the H-E-L-L was he thinking ? I can tell you that I added him immediately to the list of subjects that are going to be used in this experiment with the RNA-deconstructor human immunodeficiency virus. This time this is an improved version which works (I think). -- Dr. Madh
I'm from overseas. First time I've heared about Dick Chaney I thought they were talking about a porn actor.
The tag is misleading at best, if not an outright troll. There is no indication that the donor was pressured or coerced in any way. In fact there is no indication of any wrongdoing except for an allegation by the American scientist, with no offering of proof. Do we know what HIS motives were?
Whoever greenlit this should have caught it-- for God's sake the article itself is a blurb, it would take 30 seconds to read. If you're against human cloning there's plenty of fodder for your argument, you should not be allowed to use Slashdot as your pulpit to demonize the other side.
Oh, BTW absolute Capitalism doesnt work either. See USA for details
Or Somalia.
Le français vous intéresse?
I disagree with the assertion that communism doesn't work. The problem is that communism doesn't scale. It works quite well in communities of up to a few dozen people, however.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I've often thought that the medical ethics community was a bunch of smart, Talmudic guys somehow looking for relevancy and importance through their arguing skills. E.g. if a man dies in a car wreck and there's no next of kin, is it OK to harvest his organs? OK, fine -- you are in the middle of harvesting the guys liver, and the intended donor is there cut open -- just when you are about to transfer the liver, the next of kin appear, declare that if you take the liver out of their family member, he won't have one in the afterlife. But if you don't do the transfer the intended recipient will probably die earlier due to having been cut open -- blah blah blah blah.
Is it OK to harvest fetal material from abortions. When is it OK to pull the plug on a brain-dead person? When is it OK to euthanize somebody?
This is comical: in early medicine, you had doctors robbing bodies out of graves so they could figure out how the bodies worked. Sometimes they'd get lynched for this, so doctors established a network, so that doctors from town-a would tell doctors from town-b, "we got a body in cemetary-a". Town-b doctors would rob it, and when they had a body in cemetary-b, they'd tell the doctors from town-a. That's the origin of modern medicine.
I wonder what the medical ethicists would have said.
I think we'd all be better off if we didn't have medical ethicists, and instead just asked ourselves, "what is legal?"
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Well, a prostitute knows what she's selling, doesn't she? A lab worker, on the other hand, probably expects to use her mind, not her ovaries.
What everyone seems to be missing is that, if there's a power gradient, there's implicit coercion involved.
... it's the stem cells from human fetuses that they have a problem with. It's one of those "slippery slope" cases, whether you believe it or not.
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.
Seeing as how his name is Woo Suk Hwang, we can at least be assured that he has an abundant supply of semen to work with.
Below is the full text of the article from the "Wall Street Journal".
U.S. Scientist Quits Stem-Cell Alliance
By a WALL STREET JOURNAL Staff Reporter
November 12, 2005; Page A5A
A prominent U.S. scientist is withdrawing from an international collaboration to create human embryonic stem cells.
Gerald Schatten, a cell biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, said he was severing all collaborations with the laboratory of Dr. Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul University.
Dr. Hwang, a veterinarian, has drawn international applause for leading the first effort to clone human embryos and extract their stem cells. Last month, he announced the formation of the World Stem Cell Foundation, an international alliance aimed at spreading that technology.
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.
The above article does not state explicitly the matter of coercion, but the article strongly implies it. The pressure to produce results at Seoul University (and other Korean universities) is very intense, yet unfortunately, Korean society rejects the ethical standards that are routinely practiced and implemented in universities and laboratories in the West. Hence, American rules forbid workers on a research project from donating their own eggs for the research: the aim is to prevent any pressure from being applied to the workers. In Korea, the female lab worker most definitely felt pressure to "put out", and no one gave a damn.
For the old timers in this forum, I encourage you to do a search for the original story of the "cloning breakthrough". SlashDot had started a thread about it in 2004 or early 2005.
I will reiterate what I said in previous Slashdot threads about cloning. I salute the go-slow approach that the West (which includes Japan) has taken. Its people have repeatedly debated the ethics of the subject and enacted laws ensuring an ethical approach to the matter.
Such is not the case in Korea and, especially, China (which includes Taiwan province and Hong Kong). No national debate on the subject ever arose in Korea or China. The Koreans and the Chinese view cloning humans as merely another bland step in science. Hence, last year, the Chinese created a human-rabbit embryo but destroyed it after a couple of days.
The fundamental purpose of economics is to allocate goods and services efficiently by pricing their value correctly. Communism, of virtually all varieties, swear that they can do this pricing function better than capitalism. They never have. After so many decades, the default communist response to such a request is a quick change of subject or juvenile assertions that economics is not about efficient allocation.
Before the gulags and the death camps come along, there is the fundamental fact that communism can't set a price. All the subsequent violence stems from power mad people who won't make way when, once again, this fact is proven in the real world. There have been communist societies that didn't turn violent, the pre-marxian utopian experiments are a good example. Instead, they all shut themselves down when they figured out after a year or two that it was never going to work.
Only the ignorant and/or evil are communists these days.
As far as capitalism goes, it's funny how the closer to capitalism you get, the better your economic results get (compare economic growth rates and unemployment between France and the US). The closer you get to communism, the worse things become. The US is a capitalist state the same way that the USSR was a communist state. Both states followed their models imperfectly but where the US strays from principles, it performs worse economically, where the USSR strayed from principles (NEP period, for example) it performed much better.
Generally it's done via a comparative body count. You can't beat the Khmer Rouge in the % sweepstakes. They offed about a third of their population. Now that's revolutionary commitment!
Jesus wept.
prostitute? in korea? U can't imagine. . . me want you long time! nuther words, nuthin but there.
This oft sampled quote (me so horny, me love you long time) is originally from Kubrick's (rip) classic Full Metal Jacket, a film which brilliantly and disturbingly explores a dichotomy (perhaps even the dichotomy) inherent in human nature. It's set during the Vietnam "conflict" (heh) era. The plot events take place in a marine boot camp preparing infantry for deployment to Vietnam and shortly after, in the country itself. It has absolutely nothing to do with Korea or the US-Korean involvement of the 50s.
But please, don't let such trivial details stop your asian generalizations.
Funny you should mention that. Down in OZ we had a top flight race car driver called Dick Johnson
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
Thank you for providing me with a good example of the right-wing propaganda I mentioned in my previous post.
If you quit buying what fauxnews sells you and do your homework, you will see that therapies using ESCs are practiced all over the world with stunning results. The most amazing progress is made in regenerating heart tissue and there's also some stunning progress in spinal cord injuries.
Don't go silently into that peaceful night
For all the slashdot crowd here comparing egg donation to sperm donation or, heaven forbid, having to work long hours, a basic interjection of reality (though IANAMD)
1) Egg donation is a surgical procedure. A painful surgical procedure. A single egg is not magically transported from the woman's body - essentially a surgical procedure akin to a biopsy is peformed. Yes, modern surgical methods are better, but the pain is real, the risk of surgery is real, which leads to:
2) Egg donation potentially impacts fertility. This is a delicate procedure, and things can go wrong.
Donating one's eggs to scientific research is a noble action, and I deeply respect the person who does so. But it's a serious matter, and the merest appearnace that outside pressure was applied to influence a worker to donate her eggs calls into question the ethics of the project team itself.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
Actually communism worked pretty well... in small hunter gatherer tribes where every member of the community realised that his/her existence depended on the welfare of the other members. Therefore sharing resources, in that context, is the most obvious way to do things. In larger societies, it's more difficult to relate the welfare of Joe I Don't Dnow and Don't Wanna Know Who, to one's own best interest is much more difficult. And swindling is easy in any big structure, whatever type of government or private interest it resprents. Similarly capitalism works when the population is small enough that the accumulation of resources by a few does not significantly deplete the globally available resources. But since resources are finite, when the increase of welfare of a few signifies a significant drop of survival odds of a significant fraction of the population... things change and usually in bloodshed, since the established elite is not likely to be willing to forfeit its priviledges for the benefit of mere "commoners". Capitalism is the economic system of choice when rsources (and thereofore opportunity) seem plentiful, while communism is the system ofchoice of desperate people who think of survival, when resources appear very limited. The failure of the first is the the system itself whic acts as a positive feedback pump which causes resources to become ever scarcer for the greater number. The failure of the second is that as soon as survival seems assured, people start wishing to improve their personal lot with respect to their fellow humans. Their respective success is their downfall in the end.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
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.
How about American settlers? THey offed 90% of the native american population. Also the west was settled using the homestead act- the worst kind of capitalism where the federal governement would give a parcel of land and supplies to any family which would grab some land from the natives and kill all the natives in the area. Also if the rich in the US had not been shit scared of a communist revolution no new deal would have happened, no labor reforms , no social security. You would still be working 12 hour days 6 days a week in life threatening conditions with no job security or hope for retirement. I dont think communism works but we need to have a few communist countries around to keep the fear of god in the rich so they dont become too greedy
**Life is too short to be serious**
I agree that a totally captitalist system will in 99.99% of cases create the strongest economy, which would be fine if the economy was the be-all and end-all of creating a society that works.
Equally important to a society's success are law & order, social equality, healthcare and education. In a totally capitalist state, everyone pays their own way whether they can afford to or not. This creates a situation where the rich get richer, healthier and more powerful (see lobbyists for details. The Pharma. industry couldnt get their way in govornment if they hadn't so much money, nor could the food industry). The poor of society loose out, become disaffected, angry and ultimately someone pays the price. The French govornment are finding that out the hard way, and the collectve tragedy of New Orleans stripped bare the inequality of American society. The poor people of N.O had less say in what happens in the court than one lobbying group in Washington
No country is immune. I'm Irish, and proud of it. We have one of the strongest economies in the world, it's easily outperforming the USA at the moment (in terms of percentages, not overall size) but I see ways in which money is starting to sway govornment decisions here, such as the decision to allow a butt-ugly & potentially unsafe Natural Gas pipeline and processing plant to be built in one of the most picturesque parts of our west coast. The company responsible is Shell, and they're f**king the Irish people over for govornment backhanders (probably). The gap between the rich and the poor is growing here, and i'ts a sad thing to see.
The best way to maintain relative equality is to provide a (hopefully positive) feedback loop between the higher echelons of economic success and the poorest in society, through good, affordable healthcare, free(ish) education and laws & tax systems that let people who work hard earn good money (and therefore strengthen the economy). It's a big chunk of capitalism mixed with a small dose of socialism.
All of these things, if implemented by smart, forward thinking politicians who are chosen in free & fair elections, will in themselves bolster the economy and look after the interests of the people of that country, which is basically what Govornments are there for. No country is perfect.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.