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."

More informative link

[Sockatume]

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8461 [newscientist.com]

But questions over his data only surfaced last week, when Hwang told Science that the 2005 paper contains four instances in which the same photographs were mistakenly used to represent cells cloned from different patients.

In one case, one of two duplicated photographs is enlarged relative to the other.

In a second, one of two duplicated pictures is distorted by being enlarged to different extents along its horizontal and vertical axes, Science has confirmed. "This is a level of error beyond sending the wrong file," says Robert Lanza, who leads a rival cloning group at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Now questions are also being asked about DNA fingerprint plots in the paper. The plots were presented to demonstrate a match between nuclear DNA from the donors and the cells cloned from them. So they should look similar, with peaks at the same points. But a South Korean blog pointed out last week that in at least five of the matched plots, the peaks are also strikingly similar in shape and size - more so than would usually be expected if they came from different cells.

Re:Hang on

[IgnoramusMaximus]

The cloning has not been proven 'fake' yet.

But one of the participants in the project claims that 11 colonies from the set on which the paper was based on were fake [iht.com]. Which is likely to put the credibility of whole thing in a rather negative light in the scientific community, to put it mildly.

Re:Hang on

[Red Flayer]

" The cloning has not been proven 'fake' yet"

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 /.ed. There are pretty credible allegations of doctoring results, and the paper has been withdrawn.

Re:Faked how?

[Kristoph]

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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Re:Hang on

[DeepHurtn!]

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.

Questions...

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Scientific American: Hwang researcher of the year

[MasterC]

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" [sciam.com].

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"?

scientific method would eventually find out

[peter303]

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.

Re:Sensational but not factual yet

[Anonymous Coward]

I read this in the Science magazine site http://sciencemag.org/ [sciencemag.org]. Here's the link to the news http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/310/575 4/1595/ [sciencemag.org].

This is not about science nor about ethics.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.