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S. Korea Cloning Success Faked?
minus_273 writes "The BBC is reporting that it appears that the human cloning in Korea might have been faked." From the article: "At least nine of 11 stem cell colonies used in a landmark research paper by Dr Hwang Woo-suk were faked, said Roh Sung-il, who collaborated on the paper. Dr Hwang has agreed to ask the US journal Science to withdraw his paper on stem cell cloning, Mr Roh said ... Last month, Dr Hwang resigned from his main post as head of the World Stem Cell Hub, after it emerged that some of the eggs used in his research were donated by his staff - in contravention of international guidelines. Now it is some of the research itself which is being called into question."
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
But one of the participants in the project claims that 11 colonies from the set on which the paper was based on were fake. Which is likely to put the credibility of whole thing in a rather negative light in the scientific community, to put it mildly.
" The cloning has not been proven 'fake' yet"
/.ed. There are pretty credible allegations of doctoring results, and the paper has been withdrawn.
You're right. That's why TFA and TFS don't say that the the results have been proven a fake. But not proven != not true.
" I think it is only some of the 'morality' of the experiment that could be called into question so far."
No. RTFA. At the minimum, read TFS, since TFA is
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I think if you RTFA you will see that they essentially faked photographs/data of 9 out of the 11 colonies by using the donor cells and the 2 colonies they did actually produce.
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With reference to this particular project, the moral questions have nothing to do with the morality of stem cell research itself. It has to do with the source of the material they were working with -- the head researcher's lab assistants. This is considered immoral for the same reason that teachers are not allowed to have sex with their students, even if the student is above the age of consent: someone in a subordinate position cannot make a truly free choice.
Did he think he'd get away with it?
Didn't pesky concerns like peer review, and other scientists attempting to repeat his success bother him?
Fake studies always gets exposed given time, so what benefit did he think he was getting out of this?
So I picked up this month's Scientific American and was reading the their "Scientific American 50" the other day and realized that they had named Hwang the "Research Leader of the Year".
If the allegations about fabricating and faking the data are true, then I'm curious what the editors at SciAm will do? Rename him to "Fraud Leader of the Year"?
:wq
Many fakes are found months after when other labs try to reproduce the results in a paper. Its less usual to find them during the review of the paper. The scienitific method is to publish, reproduce and improve on others results.
A classic case was immunopsupression of skin grafts. One guy was painting mouse fur to appear like it came from a different result. People couldnt reproduce what he said he was supposed to be doing.
I read this in the Science magazine site http://sciencemag.org/. Here's the link to the news http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/310/575 4/1595/.
The point is his research is not about human cloning. He cloned human embryo and extracted stem cells. In his 2005 science paper, his team made 11 stem cell lines that were cloned and extracted from 5-6 different donors who have fatal illnesses like spinal cord injury, which was considered as a landmark research, because it clearly showed not only the possibility of clinical application of the stem cell treatment but also the highly effective procedure(11 cell lines out of 150eggs). It turned out, however, none of these stem cells from the patients don't even seem to exist. He fabricated the result by taking pictures of several stem cell lines from IVF embryo (not cloned, but fertilized)and manipulated into 11 different pictures. His DNA result also seemed to look unusually identical, which people started supecting that the data were not from the different cells. After being questioned, he has refused to validate his result by DNA finger printing. Now one of his co-worker disclosed the fact that the whole research was faked. Before this news came out, the korean government even awarded him 26.5 billion without any official funding proposal and all of korean media had been singing his name every day since his paper came out, so this is not a media or ethicists killing scientist or stem cell research. This is a big ugly lie made by an ambitious scientist who has no morality and conscience.