Slashdot Mirror
Prime Human Cloning Researcher Humiliated
Starker_Kull writes "Today, the first scientist to clone human egg cells, Dr. Hwang Woo-suk, was forced to resign from his post for 'breaches of ethics'. It appears that the ethical breaches consisted of overzealous assistants who volunteered their own eggs for use. After Dr. Hwang declined the offer, the assistants secretly donated their eggs under false names. After Dr. Hwang discovered the deception, he tried to cover it up to protect his researchers - but the news eventually leaked out."
Point in fact, it was originally alleged that he pressured the women into giving their eggs. By pressured, it was "your eggs or your job".
I don't know which version is correct, but the first time I saw this story reported the relevant facts were not that assistants had surreptitiously donated eggs, but that the primary researcher himself had compelled one or more assistants to donate their eggs.
Looks like a little further digging is in order to clear this up.
The ehtics rules are their because it's an area ripe for abuse. Junior researchers could be pressured and thus "voluntary" might not really be voluntary. As the story goes, the donations were properly refused and then given anonymously. It might seem that there was no pressure and therefore legit. Even here it's a tad dicey. First because it puts pressures for unethical behaviour on competing scientist who lack such "enthusastic" assistants. Second because the story is perhaps too pat and one could imagine this story is a rule dodge to conspire to permit "voluntary" donations. E.g. if you can pressure someone to donate an egg it's not a stretch to pressure them to donate it anonymously as well. And third there's all sort of ways an avuncular senior research might hint and cajole a naive adoring junior researcher to act in this manner without actually telling her what to do.
So the point is it's ripe for abuse and the fact that a cover-up happened is what changed this from a grey area to a black and white one. One the otherhand there have been famous examples on medical researchers using their own selves to supply stuff. For example. craig ventor the human genome researcher turned out also to be one of the 5 test subjects whose DNA was sequences first.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Same thing is going on with this submission. The linked BBC story says nothing about Dr. Hwang being forced to resign. In fact, it sounds like he resigned voluntarily. The submitter added the "forced" and "humiliated" part himself.
It's almost as if some slashdot submitters don't like what this guy is doing and are making up whatever spin and hyperbole they can to discredit him. Shame on the editors for not reading the linked articles to check if the submission description is accurate.
The BBC article only discusses the egg donations made by his research assistants. Here are some excerpts from a longer piece in the New York Times (reg req) which describe a different problem:
"His world reputation is now expected to suffer a major dent over his admissions that he lied to an international scientific journal over eggs obtained in what many see as an ethically murky manner. [...] Roh Sung Il, the administrator of MizMedi Hospital in Seoul, disclosed at a news conference on Monday that during 2002 and 2003, he made payments of $1,400 to each woman who donated eggs. Egg donation is an unpleasant procedure that involves a week of daily hormone shots, culminating with the extraction of eggs through a hollow needle. "For those who go through discomfort and sacrifice, it seemed natural to give some money as compensation," Dr. Roh told reporters. [...] Dr. Hwang said he had wondered why the hospital had become a regular source of eggs, while other hospitals were having difficulties. "I raised the matter, but Roh Sung Il, the administrator of MizMedi Hospital in Seoul, said that there were no problems in the procurement process and I did not raise the issue afterwards," he told reporters. After the ethical scandal flared this week, dozens of women in Dr. Hwang's Internet fan club have sent e-mail messages volunteering their eggs.
Confirming the other longstanding rumor, South Korea's Health Ministry said Thursday that an ethics investigation at Seoul National University had found that the two junior scientists had given their own eggs for research. But it said those donations had not violated ethics guidelines because they were voluntary.
As the scientists' egg donations were neither "coerced or coaxed" nor "aimed at making profit," there has been "no violation of ethics guidelines," Choi Hee Joo, a Health Ministry spokesman, told reporters before Dr. Hwang's announcement.
In May 2004, Nature raised ethical questions concerning the origin of Dr. Hwang's eggs. At the time, Dr. Hwang denied that researchers in his team had donated their own eggs to his research.
In an interview last May, he said all eggs had been harvested from volunteers without payment.
Cloning is not a direct stem cell research problem. Fetal stem cells are harvested from fetuses: there's no shortage of such tissue, from abortions or potentially from cultured embryos otherwise discarded from in-vitro fertilization attempts, so cloning is an unnecessary expense and complication in such work.
But your friend may be in better luck than you realize. There is some fascinating work going on, involving the use of adult stem cells which naturally transform into specific tissues when the system needs them. This doesn't seem to require fetal cells from donors, but has been done for successful treatment of diabetes in some lab animals. If it turns out to be possible to get nerve cells to reform with stem cells at all, it may be possible to use adult stem cells from your friend to help create new nerve tissue.
The ability to coerce subordinates into giving time, money, or even body parts is high in the scientific research fields because there are so few good quality job openings and much pressure to produce results. Therefore the need to establish an ethical boundary against having lab workers or other subordinates contribute anything but paid (often, but not always) labor to the project.
However, this happened in Korea where there is overwhelming pressure on people (applied since they are born) to self-sacrifice and give more and more to a group cause. There is also enormous pressure to serve without question the next higher figure in the chain of authority.
The director of the project was most likely right in claiming that there was no pressure to actually placed or implied on the lab workers to give up their body parts. However the social pressure was overwhelming, and all the director had to do was mention that 'donors' were needed and the lab workers would comply.
This is the type of situation that the ethical guideline was established to prevent. The director would have realized that his subordinants would have delivered the eggs and should have taken stronger measures to prevent this from happening. However, given the cultural context, it is unlikely that the director felt that he should abide by the ethical constricture.
Sort of like American rock star mentioning that he enjoys fellatio to couple of backstage groupies. No pressure, no insinuations, but the need is serviced without question.
They give the woman hormones to make her ovaries ripen, then apply a local anesthetic to her genitals. Afterward, they inject a syrenge through the wall of the vagina and use it to pull eggs out. It's not like they have an inscision (although, that was my first thought too...)
-Bucky