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Prime Human Cloning Researcher Humiliated

Posted by Zonk on from the political-setback dept.

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."

11 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe I'm confused ... by rkcallaghan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But what exactly was unethical about lab workers also being donors in the first place?

    ~Rebecca

    1. Re:Maybe I'm confused ... by dbolger · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I am not a scientist, so I'm not sure, but I think the fact that they used false names brings the ethics of the researchers into some disrepute. The chap tried to cover it up to protect their reputations, and in doing so brought himself into disrepute. Its a horrible little circle :(

    2. Re:Maybe I'm confused ... by tgv · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Any relation between an employer and employee is a minefield, but in this case ethics demands that the eggs were donated voluntarily. That can be easily doubted in the case of subordinates in a strict hierarchy.

      And, IMHO, it should be, but that's (as I said) my opinion.

    3. Re:Maybe I'm confused ... by jcaren · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Whats the big deal?

      How do we know he did not know about it? In such
      situations you shoiuld assume the worst.

      A similar example is nuclear reprocessing facility workers
      taking off thier RAD badges, to ensure that they can
      do overtime without exceeding thier safe legal dose.

      When health and safety found out (as usual, via the
      natiaonal newspapers), the employer said that it did not
      notice employees in the hazmat areas without badges and
      because of this they were never prosecuted.

      Moral of the story: ignorance is a good excuse - if you
      can get away with it.

    4. Re:Maybe I'm confused ... by Halfbaked+Plan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You can't do good science if your personal emotions and ego are wrapped up too tightly with the experiment.

      Whoah! That would rule out just about any scientist. Or anybody else doing any kind of work they care about.

      Which leaves the work for dispassionate drones and the mediocre, I suppose.

      --
      resigned
    5. Re:Maybe I'm confused ... by flyingsquid · · Score: 4, Insightful
      But in this case Dr Hwang was unaware of this, so it does make me ask - "whats the big deal?"

      He says he was unaware of it. However, Hwang also paid for the eggs- about 1,400 dollars per donor, from his own pocket- but claimed in his _Nature_ paper that the eggs were from volunteers. So he's already been caught lying about how he conducts his research, why should we believe him now?

      Furthermore, at least one of the women he took eggs from was one of his graduate students. Now, as a grad student you basically depend on your advisor for everything: funding, office space, research opportunities, help with your PhD, a successful defense of your PhD, letters of recommendation for jobs and scholarships. No academic relationship is as open to abuse as the relationship between a graduate student and supervisor, because the advisor has so much power and the student, so little. Asking Jane Doe off the street for her ova is one thing- she can say "no", and what can you do about it? Asking your graduate student is another thing entirely: she knows you can do any number of things to crush her career, so she's pressured to say yes. It's a disgusting abuse of power and this creep should never work again. Sure, innocent until proven guilty and all... but the fact that he's resigning and his collaborator is rushing to distance himself is pretty telling.

      Finally I find his defense pretty ludicrous. He said they went behind his back to donate eggs? That's not much of a defense, to say that you ran such a sloppy operation and did such a piss-poor job of conducting your research that you didn't even realize your own students were donating their ova. That, and it's just a little hard to swallow.

    6. Re:Maybe I'm confused ... by pla · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The line between voluntary and reluctant donation is very vague because it can be assumed that lab workers can easily be put under pressure

      I hate to break it to you, but outside the hard physical sciences, at least 90% of research involves freshmen and sophmores (and mostly female at that) "pressured" into "volunteering", usually for a significant part of their grade in an "intro to experimental methodology" (or comparable) class.

      The problem here involves pure and unadulterated BS politics. The professor "lied" to protect his staff, the info got out anyway, so his affiliation panicked over the nature of his work and requested he take a hike. Nothing more, nothing less.

      And the real pity here? Not just his career - He'll get another non-research academic job within a few years. No, instead, we should feel bad about the invalidation of his findings just because of a combination of unfortunate circumstances, with his area of study not the least of which.

  2. I don't get it by Tx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Last time this story came around, it wasn't clear to me that this guy did not know his researchers had donated their eggs. If he'd been a cold bastard and put all the blame on the researchers in question as soon as he found out, he'd probably have got away with it. Instead he tried to protect them, and this is what he gets for it.

    Ah well, no good deed goes unpunished, as the saying goes.

    --
    Oh no... it's the future.
  3. Re:What exactly is the problem? by geoffrobinson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's always the coverup that gets you, not the original crime. Martha Stewart, Richard Nixon...

    --
    Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
  4. unfair by penguin-collective · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From the BBC story, this sounds grossly unfair to Dr. Hwang.

    According to the BBC, Dr. Hwang did not attempt to violate the policy, he did not even know about the fact that the women donated, and it is clear that he wasn't trying to circumvent the policy either. It sounds to me like he did nothing wrong.

    Yes, he did lie to Nature about it, but I find his justification acceptable. While there are some ethical considerations that go into publishing a journal, Nature has no business conducting ethics investigations, and this particular aspect of the experiment had no bearing on the scientific validity of the results.

    To me, this story mostly reflects poorly on Nature--attempting to pry into areas that really are none of their business--and the Korean research establishment.

    Hats off to Dr. Hwang for being willing to take the blame for something he didn't do. I suspect that his motivation is to keep human cloning research going, and he knows that the media and politicans would continue a feeding frenzy over this as long as he stays in his job.

  5. The difference being... by WindBourne · · Score: 4, Insightful

    that these researchers used their own, rather than an assitant's cells.

    When this story broke, the first instance of it was that the assistant was forced. Now, we have that she donated. Which is right? Did she change the version so that she could keep her job? We will never know the truth.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.