Slashdot Mirror
Panel Confirms S. Korean Cloning Fraud
mmell writes "South Korean cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk created a stir when he claimed to have successfully cloned human stem cells, claims which were almost immediately viewed with skepticism in the scientific community. Now an article on the BBC's website chronicles the doctor's final fall from grace as nine scientists empanelled at Seoul University conclude that Doctor Hwang's sensational claims were in fact an elaborate fraud (although they have also confirmed that Doctor Hwang's prior claim to have cloned a dog appears to be valid)." Confirmation of the investigation begun last week.
The worst bit of the fraud, as I heard on the BBC this morning, is it lead to considerable investment in Cell Research in S. Korea because Hwang was not at the periphery, but at the forefront of the field. Now S. Korea will be relegated to backwater status in the field of Stem Cell and Cloning Research (which will in all likelihood severly diminish their chances for a spot in the 2008 Olympics Tailored Stem Cell competition.)
However, Don Asmussen of San Francisco Datebook notoriety has again nailed it and skewered bystanding bigwigs in Washington DC and Hollywood on his followthrough.
But will he try out for the 2008 Olympic Political/Social Commentary squad, that's the big question
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
A panel? As if there were some doubt?
Hwang Woo-suk: I committed fraud.
Panel: *deliberates* No you didn't.
Mox
The last time we had a story it was Woo-Suk Hwang...
Interesting to see how everybody (including the news media) changed the name after all the bad jokes. woo suk hwang? apparently he doesn't anymore.
"MY APOCALYPTIC TENOR HAS NOT BEEN DISPELLED!" - T-Rex, qwantz.com
... it was going to be about story cloning on slashdot. Then I realized there can be no doubt about that.
claims which were almost immediately viewed with skepticism in the scientific community
Of course they did. I love when someone play the "I told you so" card.
All the "We knew no WMD were in Irak, it wasn't the reason for the war", "I knew you shouldn't have bought that brand", "My mother warned me about you" and "I had a feeling" people will now feel validated. Scientist do the same after all!.
It's more a matter of which is the correct way to state his name. Anglicized is First, Last. In Korea (corea, chosun, etc.) it's the family name first, followed by sur-name Woo-suk Hwang is correct for his home country, but in the west he will be Hwang Woo-suk.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Quick Dr. Hwang, clone yourself and escape the country! oh wait...
He really did clone a person.
He said "I cloned you, dog!"
And everyone just misunderstood cuz they don't have enough flava.
Then why still refer to him as Dr. Hwang? By Western rules, it should be Dr. Woo-Suk. The article is inconsistent in its naming scheme.
"MY APOCALYPTIC TENOR HAS NOT BEEN DISPELLED!" - T-Rex, qwantz.com
Whomever said journalists are brilliant?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What I don't get is why he did this, or (if you believe his claims) why he was setup?
Ok, clearly there could be some incentive -- the amount of money, adulation, and so forth pouring into his office after the paper was published was stratospheric. But did he (or the conspirators) actually think the fraud wouldn't be found out? Eventually they would've had to make good on their claim of indvidualized stem cell lines, and they couldn't do that. The gig would've been up in another year at most -- hardly long enough to be worthwhile.
This entire debacle has set back stem cell research -- many labs stopped or slowed down on their own research after the announcement. Some tried to replicate the bogus research, or simply found money drying up because who wants to back the 2nd place finisher? And now that it's been shown to be a fraud, how difficult will it be to get donations now?
The only explanation I can think of is a conspiracy by anti stem cell research groups, and I don't buy that. The only people who could've pulled off the fraud were top scientists in the field, who have been doing similar research for years. And now they're all disgraced along with Hwang.
It just doesn't make sense to me.
"Dog Clones Man" would be.
Just as long as Cleopatra doesn't distract Abe Lincoln too much... JFK might get upset.
I Lost My Virginity While Waiting for BSD to Compile.
It's sad to see human cloning turn into the new Cold Fusion. I'm not for actual human cloning for the purpose of reproducing a human but I am strongly for it for health and medical reasons. It's not an ethical object the problem is purely technical. At best the clone is a retroactive twin and not a duplicate of the person. There's simply far too many risks with the state of current technology. From everything I've read on the subject the risk of health problems and birth defects is huge. One child with birth defects could set the science back twenty years let alone the obvious misery for the child. The technology is in it's infancy and needs time to develope. Some dramatic failures will only fuel the anti cloning crowd. Let animal and tissue cloning become a part of everyday life before the giant step of cloning a human happens. I think if the word cloning wasn't even used in that context it might help. Like I say it's not the person it's a twin and not that much different in a physical sense than any embryo produced in a lab today. I'd rather see the effort put into tissue cloning. Producing a heart or a kidney through the process and having it fail won't do the damage that a failed embryo would.
This is truly depressing news. Any science that makes headlines and later turns out to be fraud damages the reputation and credability of science in general.
When the research claims a medical breakthrough, the backlash is even worse. The public ignores most science that doesn't impact their daily lives. Medicine is one of the few areas of science that is almost guarenteed to impact an average joe at some point, and as a result, people pay very close attention.
Human cloning and stem cell research are guarenteed to be headline topics any time a new study is released, and this sets the entire field back several years - both in terms of credability and in terms of research. It forces everyone in the field to step back and reevaluate everything they think they know.
Worse yet, it forces the public to be distrustful of all science.
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
Does that mean:
In South Korea, young people clone themselves?
For whatever reason it seems that in some countries the level of dishonesty and corruption is higher. There might be a good reason for it such as poverty, authoritarian government, and so on. The reason I bring this is up is because as guilty as Hwang is he didn't act alone. Some of his collaborators knew about it, but in general I think the same stuff would be very likely to go on in South Korea, because of some specific socal or cultural factors. Somebody mentioned on the news how scientists in many Asian countries achieve this level of celebrity. As Americans we would not even understand this easily - young teenagers wanting to hang up posters of Bohr in their bedrooms instead of posters of Paris Hilton!? One one side this is admirable as it bring up people who want to learn for the sake of learning, on the other side it puts enourmous pressure on the scientist. It is also difficult when the goverment is very authoritarian and will provide funding but then will keep the gun to your head until you get some results. So the two forces - the temptation for fame and fortune coupled with pressure form the government that wants to show off to other countries will create this situation where individuals will cheat and fake their results.
I don't think that Hwang should not be held responsible -- I believe he will be punished severely for shaming the country -- but I think his case also says something about the whole South Korean culture. Not to be prejudicial but from now on anything that comes out of SK's academia will be taken with a "grain of salt."
High levels of courrption and dishonesty is why I came to this country from the former Soviet Union -- it was possible to live there and even to become very rich but only at the expense of lying, stealing, cheating and bribing. I could and did not want to function in such a society so I came to the U.S. As much as people complain about the government and society here, I think it is still the best one that exists as far as a collective sense of honesty and accountability goes.
Do you really think all of those people would be willing to work together? I think a lot of those great leaders couldn't stand being second banana to anyone.
I was listening to the radio this morning and they had a story on NPR about this fraud. They said it not only hurt the reputation of the S. Korean lab, but also when it was reported that they had 'cloned' a human embryo, funding dried up for other similar legitimate research labs (such as Massachusetts' Advanced Cell Technology) as well.
y Id=5147015
Story is here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
Legitimate research lab: http://www.advancedcell.com/
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
He did cloned Snuppy the dog.
Before everyone rushed to condemn him (rightfully), he did advance cloning technology. Some of the techniques he pioneered, in particular in nucleus extraction, are now standard procedure.
Which is sad, because one wonders why a technically gifted person such as he would stoop so low.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
CNN had an interesting article about academic culture in South Korea, which provides some context for the scandal. http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/01/06/skorea .professors.ap/index.html
I am desperately seeking a Civilization I-IV joke here, but it just ain't happening.
Actually, Hwang would be his surname. This article presents the name in the common Korean sense, as you stated, but Woo-Suk is his given name, not his familial. The hyphen gives that away, usually, at least in Korean names.
Isn't Hwang his last name? wikipedia
Errr now you're confusing matters, isn't family name the same as surname? And actually Hwang is the surname and Woo-suk is the given name (first name). So in Korea (and in China, Japan and Vietname), he is called Hwang Woo-suk. And Woo-suk Hwang is the Anglicized version.
he obviously doesn't know much about the history between einstein and tesla to suggest having 'em work together on anything. einstein and tesla disliked each other, and the former launched a smear campaign against alternating current (tesla's idea; einstein was a DC advocate), vilifying it by lobbying successfully to have it used for electric chairs.
ed
It figures that it'd be the Koreans who would successfully clone a dog. They want to secure their food source for centuries to come.
He has a point. The excitement over the eventually-invalidated-results was quite large. At the time, I would not say that the scientific community was 'skeptical'. Yes, there were skeptics, there always are. But to focus on the skeptics now is just 20/20 hindsight.
But it's too bad that the parent post mixes up the issue by comparing it to Iraq.
Well, since clones start as babies, we can raise them with the necessary team spirit... And the beautiful thing is, we get unlimited attempts ;)
Grundes!
It wasn't Einstein, it was Planck. DUH!
"The university panel ruled that an experiment last year in which Dr Hwang's team claimed to have cloned a dog was genuine.
A three-year-old Afghan hound called Snuppy - short for Seoul National University puppy - was genetically identical to his father according to DNA tests, the panel found."
Three years aging in just one year? That's just incredible! Such a growth spurt should not have been overlooked by the panel! Did they not even think to count his teeth?
Why does a doctor who has successfully cloned a dog need to falsely claim he can clone a stem cell?
Is it more likely he has been shut-up by someone?
Conspiracy theory or not?
I am now satting here tried-ing to imagined how much Zonk payed attention in class when they done gone went over verbing stuff.
This story brings up an interesting point. I wonder if there is such a thing as collective integrity or morality when dealing with a whole country not just individuals. Typically such words as morality, integrity, honesty are attributed to individuals, but I wonder if they also can be attributed to whole countries.
Oh boy, here we go.
As much as people complain about the government and society here, I think it is still the best one that exists as far as a collective sense of honesty and accountability goes.
Oh come on. Accountability in the U.S. is a joke. Take a good long look at all the high-profile misdeeds that happen in the U.S. that go unpunished. Now, take a look at the fact that it was the Korean media that, after Nature's first story about the staff-donated eggs, aggressively pursued this story all the way and really started to break it open to the world. Also note how it was the professors at SNU who pressed for a hearing.
This is the very core of what accountability is. As a culture, you do what you have to in order to police yourself.
You extrapolating Dr. Hwang's actions and saying this dishonesty is a trait of Korean culture is at best a logical fallacy, at worst offensive. The country isn't perfect, but it deserves better analysis than you've given it.
This has been a very bad week indeed for famed stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-Suk. Not only has the crowning achievement of his scientific career been completely dismantled, but now editors at The Smoking Gun have posted evidence that Hwang's memoir about his misspent youth as a gender-bending, drug-addicted hustler may also be fraudulent.
Million Little Protein Strings topped the New York Times Best Sellers list for a significant chunk of 2005 after talk show host Oprah Winfrey selected the taudry tell-all for book club last September.
"I really identified with Hwang as a person who had experienced terrible things, made horrible choices, and somehow found a way to rise above," said Winfrey. "It was just the sort of tripe my audience loves to wallow in. Now that I discover that the story is just as genuine as a marriage proposal from Stedman Graham. As you might imagine, I'm a little pissed."
As if that weren't shocking enough, now comes news that even the fakery itself may not be genuine. Experts say the signatures on his lab notebook during the period of alleged data fudging are drastically dissimilar to ones plastered on earlier pages, and in recent interviews with the stem cell pioneer he appears to be a completely different person according to those who know him well.
Sources deep inside the isolated North Korean government are hinting that the whole embarassing episode may be an attempt to discredit the work going on at Seoul National University. For their part South Korean officials scoff at the accusation, claiming that their economically depressed neighbors to the North lack the resources to pull off such a stunt. Also, Kim Jung Il's government is so notoriously secretive that a leak of this magnitude just doesn't make sense unless it was an intentional rouse.
Hwang's supporters stand by their claim that the faked fakery is the real fake and not the original fakery committed when- oh, crap. Now I'm all confused.
Apparently dogs are much much harder to clone than sheep or cats - there are just lots of weird things that go on which make it difficult, so if that part wasn't fraud, then he's accomplished something useful before trashing his reputation and prospects of future work.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"The problem is there is far more fraud in religion than in science."
Yup. Regligion itself is the biggest fraud in religion. Religion was developed by primative societies as a way of controling the citizens. Today it remains a way for societies to control ignorant citizens.
But what happens if they get co-opted by the music industry who wants to put a pretty boy band together called "The World Leaders" with the three of them? Do you think they can resist the call to fame?
What does lead (Pb) have to do with this?
It "led" to. If you lead, then someone is led. Not lead. Unless you lead them to a matter converter.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In the article I linked to above, a scientist says: "'We depend entirely on the truthfulness of the scientific community,' Dr. Zoloth said. 'We must believe that what they are showing us and what they say has been demonstrated is worthy of our concern and attention. The South Korean story, Dr. Zoloth added, raises questions about whether the science is good. 'Good as in true and real and morally worthy of our funding," she explained.'"
But isn't that totally incorrect and naive view for a funding agency? Nowhere in Science does anyone "depend on the truthfulness of the scientific community." Science depends on testability, falsifiability (if you're a Popper-ite), repeatability, peer review, etc. These sorts of events remind you that the system is working.
My argument could be twisted around: I'm *not* paradoxically saying we should encourage scientific fraud to somehow lend scientific credibility. But given that we have an intrinsically error-prone system, error detection and correction (a strength of the modern scientific process) should be a regarded as a *good* thing.
Sadly, money was wasted on this fraudulent work. But there is no recipe *a priori* to know 100% of the time if research hypotheses are fraudulent without examining the results in a peer-reviewed and reproducible way.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
It's simple: He stopped being an objective observer of the natural world around him. He let his preconceived notions, pride, and selfishness get in the way of simple observation. It's what happens to scientists when they stop observing and start believing.
What the Korean people have to learn, as every culture and group interested in science has to learn, is that your failures are really successes. He should've published that his method didn't work. He should've been bold with his discovery of the limitations.
We have the same problem here. We honor scientists who do something amazing, but we relegate those who don't to the back burner. Both have done an equal amount for science as a whole. For every "success" there are hundreds and thousands of "failures". Each of these observations and experiments bring us closer to a greater understanding of the universe. Unfortunately, too often we want to see something amazing or we want our predictions to come true, and that taints our ability to be objective.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I think negative propositions such as that tend to fall apart upon close examination unless you have a really, really inclusive definition of "religion," such as one that would include the prevailing rational, secular mindset of our time as taught in the public schools...the reason being, when you ask "Well, WHO created this 'religion' thing?" (society) or "How is it spread?" (indoctrination) or "How exactly does it enable people to be controlled?" (by inculcating belief systems) you start to find all kinds of parallels with the dominant social mindset. That is, there is no case where you can say something about religion that you can't say about supposedly non-religious social structures.
:)
With a wide enough definition of "religion," public schools become religious institutions where students are indoctrinated for 12+ years into a certain model of seeing and thinking about the world. If your definition is really narrow, on the other hand, then you're just arbitrarily persecuting religions. The word for that is "bigotry."
Now, if you're just making the argument that our society isn't any more advanced than so-called "primitive" ones, or that the public school system is full of fraud, well, there's plenty of evidence for that
"there is no case where you can say something about religion that you can't say about supposedly non-religious social structures."
That is exactly the conclusion this solid line of logic leads to.
"public schools become religious institutions where students are indoctrinated for 12+ years into a certain model of seeing and thinking about the world"
Interesting observation.
I agree with you completely and have no intention of retracting my statements or qualifying them to limit scope.
There is one very important difference between religious structures and present day social structures. Present day social structures only claim they are telling you what to do because you are incompetent in the game of life. Religious structures include the afterlife in that and tend to further mock by acting as if you would believe in sea creatures and all seeing all powerful invisible men who can't be tested or questioned.