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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."
How do you tell the FAKE clones apart from the REAL clones? Dont they all look alike???
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I'm beginning to question whether Korea even really exists..
Oh the (cloned) humanity of it all..
The cloning has not been proven 'fake' yet. I think it is only some of the 'morality' of the experiment that could be called into question so far.
Personally I see no real moral problems with stem cell research, but then I am a complete amoral bastard.
It's only on Slashdot that you see "S. Korea Cloning Success Faked" as the headline instead of, "S. Korea Cloning Success Possibly Faked".
They're going to go and redo all the experiments. All the stem-cell researchers want this, they don't want idiotic media speculation deciding the outcome.
What happened to this postm l?tid=126&tid=95&tid=146
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/12/15/1437218.sht
when someone asks "Woo-suk" in Korea, the answer is going to be "Dr Hwang"
"Oh give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With the Y chromosome changed to X.
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We'll think of nothing but sex."
This will be used as a strawman for any of the arguments against them. "OMFG, they used their own eggs, that is teh bad, everyone says so!" Whether or not this "international guideline" is reasonable, of course, is moot. Whether they faked it or not will eventually become moot. The "immoral" aspects of using your own eggs will be blown totally out of proportion to its real impact on the process, its validity, and its methods.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
9 out of eleven results altered. Interestingly the scientific press are not interested in having the results verified they are just after blood. Of course there is a good reason for this in that it maintains standards but I would like to know if the two unaltered results are still valid and statistically of importance.
Is he not sure that the other two were faked?
I am not involved with the research, but I read a report about the submission in Science and this issue of duplicated photos of the cell colonies a few weeks ago. The issue was that Science had asked for better high-res photos at the last minute and a mistake was made on what got sent to them.
They (Science) had already had the submission paper with lower res photos that were (supposedly) clearly different from each other. So while the version of the paper that was printed in Science clearly had duplicate photos representing different colonies, the original version of the paper/photos that Science had was not that way.
I think this is just more sensationalizm to further smear an already hurting scientist.
While it is lamentable that a (likely) fake paper will be a setback for stem cell research, I can't help but see it as a blow for all of the sciences. There have been other instances where top science publications released falsified or outright bogus papers, but I believe that this one stands out by virtue of its controversial subject. Even if the paper was not faked, criticism will come from all sides, with questions ranging from the ethical standards/morality of scientists to the usefulness of the peer review process. Negative attention is the last thing needed by publically controversial research.
If it's true -- talk about having egg on your face!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
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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The BBC's Charles Scanlon in Seoul says the revelations have sparked a furious debate in the South Korean media.
Leading companies have pulled their advertisements from the television station that first revealed the reported problems with Dr Hwang's work.
Many commentators said it was unpatriotic to challenge someone who had given the country a lead in such a promising new area.
That is just scary. It is sad that a whistleblower, an advocate of truth, can be branded as "unpatriotic" for exposing a fraud. Once again nationalism and patriotism have overwealmed logic and common sense.
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
You are not a stem cell researcher, or else you would know that stem cell research is not banned. You need to get your multibillion dollar corporation to pony up some cash instead of sucking on the Federal tit.
But hey, anything to get your troll modded up, huh?
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.
You are not a stem cell researcher (they would never refer to themselves as such. The correct and proper term is developmental biologists).
Nice little bullshit story.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
I do agree that it isn't the "attempt to generate human cloning" isn't at issue here (there is an issue but that is another /. post for another day). The issue is simply this: To find a readily available source of material, did he asked his subordinates to provide the material? How much of this is "asked" vs "ordered" vs "threat" vs "we do this or fail" we may never find out. Considering if you are a research assistent working on your Ph.D under him and he approached you for tissue. If you say "yes" then the research goes on, your doctorate based upon helping write up the research, and a glowing letter of recommendation. If you turn him down, not only is there a risk the project could be a wash (weak research to write a paper on) but he may flunk you/not write a letter of recommendation/etc. By crossing the line and asking to experiment on his subordinates, he has put his subordinates in a seriously comprised position and possibly tainted the observed results which we may now find out to be fabricated.
The complaint is about a leader using their power to abuse their subordinates which is highly unethical in *any field*.
One thing to point out is that scientific fraud at this level of the scientific game, while not unprecedented, is quire rare. And a big part of this is simply due to the fact that anything truly important is worth replicating and extending, and a result that was faked is often impossible to replicate because it is the wrong result. I like to think that scientists are more honest than average, but surely to some extent it is the fear and shame of being caught doing this that keeps them more honest than that.
So I was trying to think of frauds that even come close to competing with the high profile that this case could assume, and it hasn't been easy. The Piltdown Hoax was very different in spirit. The faking of data in the report of element 118 might be close, but the original report got nothing like press attention that the Korean cloning breakthrough did. Can anybody else think of anything that really would compete?
Babar
Good questions, but maybe the fact they'd even be asked sheds some light on the (possible) answers?
An AP article, Allegations of fake research hit new high, circulated this summer detailing the misconduct of Dr. Andrew Friedman (and attributing it to stress). In late October, Luk Van Parijs was fired over research fraud. More doubts raised on fired MIT professor:
So it would seem that these individuals start out with "mild" cheating -- rationalizing, perhaps, that it saves time without any "real" harm to the research. Getting away with that would then make subsequent cheating more attractive and more easily rationalized. Maybe it is the "inability to handle that pressure [to publish]" that precipitates the actual misconduct, but I suspect the dishonesty is there from the start, including the self-deception that it isn't significant or that he won't be caught.
I don't know if that applies to Dr. Hwang, but I think greater scrutiny is in order all around. As faking research, even minor details, is itself irrational, that the perceived benefit would be irrational shouldn't suffice to dismiss the allegations (assuming there is some basis for the allegations). But accepting the "common defense" cited above would be an example of doing just that.
Wow. I've read this story before - back when it was J. Hendrik Schon faking experiments at Bell Labs, with his collaborators eventually stuck with retracting 17 Science and Nature papers.
The similarities are incredibly striking, including (according to the New Scientist) duplicated figures within papers and between papers claiming to be different samples.
What motivates someone to (apparently) fake results like this, when they're almost sure to be caught?
The cornerstone of ethical research concerning human subjects research is "free and informed consent". A subordinate agreeing to participate is not "free" consent (for the reasons mentioned in the earlier posts). These guidelines are part of a worldwide norm for human subjects research (so that a rich company cannot just go to Africa and pay people to be subjects) and every researcher is expected to know them. It really is shameful that such high profile research was carried out by violating these basic safeguards.
If you're talking about theft of intellectual property, people everywhere are guilty of that, not just those in Asia. Just look at the popularity of technologies like BitTorrent, where some people "liberate" content. Furthermore, isn't the free flow of ideas something that /.-ers generally prefer to see? Technical innovation can consist of both inspiration and perspiration. Developing technology isn't strictly a pure brute-force process, I'd guess that clever researchers in all parts of the world have been able to advance science and technology.
Technology-wise, many of these Japanese and Taiwanese firms that you're bashing have pushed the technological boundaries farther than their Western compatriots. As another poster mentioned, much of the laptop designs these days are done in Taiwan. While you might bash their work as being cookie-cutter, the engineers there had to be be creative in order to create things that could be easily mass-produced. That takes a certain type of engineering brilliancel, wouldn't you say? If you're talking purely stylistic things, like the industrial design used by the iPod, that's pretty subjective - what works for some people don't necessarily work for everyone. However, there are high end design firms in East Asia as well. Witness some of the high end electronics vendors, particularly the Japanese. A lot of their gadgets, while possibly not "useful", are pretty creative, right?
I'm also assuming that you haven't watched East Asian movies? I'd say that the choreography of many martial arts movies are pretty creative, much more than some of the recent Hollywood flicks that have come out. And then there's anime. While not to the taste of some viewers, on the whole I'd say that they're much more creative, in many respects, than Western cartoons.
In any case, copyright is a Western legal idea that has some mixed blessings, as some of our /. compatriots can attest to. Copyright can be used to protect ideas, as well as to stifle creativity. It all depends on the legal structures that enforce copyright, the legislative bodies that codify the laws, and the judicial processes used to enforce them. A lot of the more "loosely" enforced nations seem to have higher growth rates, oddly enough.
I have replicated S. Korea's faked clone experiment.
This comes after Scientific American lauded Woo Suk Hwang as the "Research Leader of the Year" (Scientific American, Dec 2005, pg 48) [I'm sure this is also available online at sciam.com, but I can't find it.] This article goes into great detail about his discoveries and some of his methods, too. It would thus appear that Hwang has either 1) been the victim of a merciless Slashdotting (unlikely) or 2) managed to fool everyone, including Sciam. Oh what a bad day for science this is :(