Prime Human Cloning Researcher Humiliated 252
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."
Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:5, Insightful)
~Rebecca
Or not, of course (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:5, Insightful)
And, IMHO, it should be, but that's (as I said) my opinion.
I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah well, no good deed goes unpunished, as the saying goes.
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why ? (Score:1, Insightful)
Bad Staff (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish more public figures acted with this level of integrity. We are seeing situations arise increasingly frequently where it turns out that no blame at all attaches it's self to public figures no matter what they or there staff/departments may have been engaged in and I hope the actions of this Dr can be a lesson to the next government minister who discovers his department has been acting illegally and realises that the excuse they didn't really bother to keep up to date with what their department was doing is not good enough.
Re:What exactly is the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
You will never know what happened, neither will I. The only thing we know is that these eggs were used (let's assume that is true, because even that you cannot know). Everything else is hypothesis and should be treated as such.
Maybe he was to blame, maybe someone else. One way or another unethical stuff happened and the boss takes the blame. Note that this does not necessarily mean his career is over. Just think of German scientists being adopted by the US after WWII. If this guy is really an international authority, he will be back in business in no time.
unfair (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The difference being... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Revisionist? (Score:3, Insightful)
But the story changed to be, that the assistant donated eggs and researcher tried to cover up. Cover-up what? That an assistant lied, or that he forced the assistant? Problem is, that now there are multi stories and impossible to know which is the truth.
In science and education, veracity is everything.
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Revisionist? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
I hear what you're saying, although I think this a bit disingenuous... the US hired nuclear, rocket, and aviation scientists.... these were skilled professions who practiced their profession for their country; they cannot be tarred with a single 'Nazi eugenics' brush that's tacitly implied.
Now if the US hired Mengele do help develop national health care policy, that's a different story...
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:3, Insightful)
anyways, where did you get the idea that people were paid for their eggs? The only mention of this in teh article(and any other I have read) was that they were paid without the knowledge of the lead researcher.
so if the women weren't asked, and were once turned down by him because of ethical concerns, I'm not sure what you're ranting about. or do you feel that he should have been at every stage of the research to know exactly what happened? if so, you probably have never done research. its way too complex especially in the medical sciences field for one person to have first hand knowledge.
of course, you seem to not believe what he said. you just make assertions not realizing that science is a lot like politics, even the whiff of somethign unethical sends scientists running for the hills.
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
he ought to have been a heartless bastard and fired the women and publicly ruined their careers. That way, he could have held himself above blame by saying he did everything he could. of course, that would make him a heartless bastard, wouldn't it?
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:unfair (Score:3, Insightful)
That human research subjects are properly consented is a crucial piece of any research on them. It's absolutely Nature's business, in this case, and they deserve credit for enforcing proper standards.
At any rate, these "Korean Stem Cell Triumph" papers all seem to have something fishy about them, either consent problems or being in an absurdly low-profile journal for what they're claiming. It's not clear to me how many independent groups are involved, but I'm predicting this is just the tip of the iceberg for scandals with them.
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:3, Insightful)
In public positions, such as the face (lead) of a research team, it's not just enough to be ethical. You must appear to be ethical, too. A cover-up can go either way. Receiving "donations" from those strictly under your command could be voluntary, or coerced. Appearances of being ethical are often more important than actually being ethical. Same goes for politicians, deans of universities, and teachers. Have you ever heard of a teacher spending a lot of time one-on-one with a student of the opposite sex to help them, find themselves wrongly accused of a heinous crime, then vindicated, but still unable to find a new job? Appearances matter.
I'm not saying it's fair. Just that it is what it is.
Re:They paid for eggs (and they were from the team (Score:2, Insightful)
One thing to consider is that it was before any code of ethics was established even in US, let alone Korea. It wasn't illegal, and wasn't breach of any known code ethics. I'm not saying that it's OK just because there was no regulation. But, it's also not something you can simply blame them for the lack of ethics, either (not that the op did that, but in general).
Re:Why the Fuss? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's so unethical about it? It's not like human life is precious or anything. It is THE cheapest thing on planet Earth.
Cloning is not so much unethical as completely useless. Nature developed sexual reproduction as a superior alternative to cloning billions of years ago, but some scientist wants to turn back the clock so he can run the media circuit or something. Big TIME magazine cover in lab jacket with crossed arms and something about God's domain or some such rubbish. Meanwhile the misfortunate subject gets X years wiped off their lifespan by default that to this bozos incompetance.
And all on the taxpayers money
Re:Why the Fuss? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not even the usual "medical ethics boards", that too often seem to be wholly staffed by "Leave well enough alone" people and ardent Christians, agree on this matter.
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Oh yes... (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, seriously. Am I alone in thinking that this sounds MORE like the morality police casting about desperately for a reason to discredit the man and his work?
What's the big deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:unfair (Score:2, Insightful)
Neither the publisher nor the reviewers are qualified to perform investigations or make judgements. They are an unaccountable, haphazard collection of people that are abusing the authority granted to them by the scientific community for the purpose of disseminating accurate scientific information for an entirely different purpose, the punishment of ethics violations.
Of course, a scientific journal may stop scientific publication for ethical reasons, but the justifications are narrow: either, the ethical violations call into question scientific accuracy, or the ethical violations are clearly egregious. Neither applies here.
But this sort of arrogance is typical for Nature. I still subscribe, even though I find their scientific judgement questionable and their extra-scientific behavior close to unacceptable. I hope (and believe) that the next few decades will shut down rags like Nature and replace them with more rational and more transparent network-based systems.
Re:unfair (Score:3, Insightful)
You do, do you? You admit the man is a liar, but then you freely take his word on what actual events transpired? Do you not see the naivety in your comment?
What you're completely discounting here is that things might not have been as Dr. Hwang says they were. What if the research assistants were "encouraged" to donate their eggs? As in "you will voluntarily donate your eggs to this research project or we'll find another person to replace you"? Wouldn't you find this ethically and morally reprehensible conduct? Yet you completely overlook this distinct possiblity.
There is a reason these people are barred from donating their genetic material to thse kinds of projects, and it's because it can easily devolve into a situation where people are being forced to do something like this. It doesn't matter if Dr. Hwang's motives were pure or not, he either (a) broke the rules or (b) assisted in the coverup of someone else breaking the rules. Either way, it's his project and his department, so ultimately the buck stops with him.
I call BullSht on all fake outrage (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey oppressive governments, if you're so concerned about ethics, why don't you make torture illegal for real and enforce anti-torturing laws by prosecuting soldiers, police, and government officials who engage in torture, cover up torture, or obstruct investigations of torture? Or would that be to ETHICAL for you? (And yes, this includes you, America)
Whenever a politician or news reporter talks about ethics, it's complete B.S. They act all high-and-mighty about stem cell research but evidently have absolutely no outrage against torturing people. I call B.S. on anyone who emanates fake outrage over stem cell research.
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is obvious that they had a big problem getting hold of eggs to do their work and this was stopping their research. The fact that they are not allowed to even pay for these eggs but must get them for free is stupid.
It is this "morality" that gets in the way of science. Science is neither good nor bad. If Albert Einstein had buggered old ladies to get to the theory of reletivity does not change the theory of relativity one bit.
The Dr in this case did great science and that is what is important. I will tell you right now that there are many many scientists who "use themselves" for their research. I will giive old examples to not get anyone in trouble...I remember some papers from David Shemin and D. Rittenberg from 1945-46 published in the Journal of Biological Chemisrty where one of the two (they never say which) ate something like 60 grams of radioactive Glycine and followed its path in their own bodies to discover that glycine is used to make the heme ring as found in hemoglobin. This was a major discovery and allowed us to work out the lifetime of a red blood cell
Researchers have never been expected to remain unemotional. They would not do it if they didnt care.... It is sure as hell not for the money. What you must remain is objective and critical of your own work, then you must get critisism from others and defend against their comments.
In my book the Prof did nothing wrong and this was just a witch hunt. His findings will live on. To all those who say he should have known what was going on are very niave. No boss is in total control of everything, when his own people went behind his back they did it with intent and there can be no blame on him. When he found out in my opinion he then did the morally right thing and protected his people. There was never any indication that any of the science was wrong. And believe it or not Nature is about science not eithics.
Let us not forget this research is done to save lives.
.
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hwang denies knowing about this part and claims he was baffled where all these eggs were coming from. I suppose it's possible he had nothing to do with this and didn't think to question his good luck... although it does raise the question of exactly who came up with the roughly $30,000 that would be needed to pay 20 women $1,430 apiece for their ova. However, at the same time you've got some of his underlings donating their ova... and he also claims to be ignorant of that as well.
If they were confident of their case they'd fire him.
Not necessarily. If he resigns he can say he's innocent and just doing it for the greater good. But firing him means that they'd have to admit that wrongdoing occurred. And that raises uncomfortable questions, like "why didn't you guys know about this stuff?", or even worse, "did you guys know about this stuff?" and "why didn't you do something about this sooner, like in 2004 when the first allegations came out?" Also, he may have some leverage. Assuming he was involved in this stuff, then I'd imagine people must have been pulling strings, bending rules, or at least looking the other way instead of asking tough questions. The agreement would probably be that they'll give him a (relatively) graceful exit and in return he will keep his mouth shut.
I mean, look at the Judith Miller saga. She was a total screwup- she cocked up the WMD story, she got too close to her sources and started becoming a mouthpiece for them instead of objectively evaluating their views, she didn't keep her editors informed of how she was involved in the Plame case... the New York Times should have thrown her out the door a long time ago. Instead, she resigned. Likewise, Jayson Blair, the guy who made up a bunch of stories in the Times? Resigned. If you really want to get rid of someone, you need to give them an easy way out or they'll fight you tooth and nail.
5: Funny? (Score:3, Insightful)
Keyword = clonning (Score:2, Insightful)
Which is quite ironic, since one of the main points in his whole field of research is that both things are to be approached with the same ethical guidelines.
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:4, Insightful)
There is nothing whatsoever ethically wrong with using eggs from your teammates. But it does violate some code of conduct that people somewhere made up. This is a technical mistake that absolutely should not make man ashamed.
The guy who stirred everything and made the noise about this issue (Gerald Schatten) is scum and a moron. It is he who should resign and kill himself, not professor Woo-suk.
Re:Maybe I'm confused ... (Score:3, Insightful)
He should be commended for paying for eggs from his own pocket, his assistants should be commended for donating their eggs. These people are doing everything they can to move science forward.
And yet the fucking society blames them.