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."

Architecture of the World Wide Web - Post gone

[appavi]

What happened to this post
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/12/15/1437218.shtm l?tid=126&tid=95&tid=146 [slashdot.org]

Donation of eggs by staff = bad?

[Gothmolly]

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.

Standards

[BananaPeel]

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.

Sensational but not factual yet

[austinpoet]

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.

A blow for science

[Miraba]

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.

Foreign policy implications

[Anonymous Coward]

IAASCR (I am a stem cell researcher) This is a devastating development in terms of progress in the field of stem cells. With the current administration's decisions to ban research, it has been all but impossible to get frant funding (and those that do have to mask it as something else). More recently, though, there's been an emotional change, and an opportunity has opened to take advantage of American fear of falling behind - God forbid the USA be 2nd in anything.

When this paper came out, the American public backlash was far-reaching. Even a Southern Republican farm-boy starts thinking, "why can they do it and not us, pop?"

My hope is that the hashed-up funding mechanisms put in place following the original research have too much momentum to stall, and we might actually continue to gain ground. Maybe we'll have learned that advancing science is a continuous activity, and that falling behind feels bad...

Re:Towards the End of the BBC Article...

[curb]

The BBC article barely touches upon the issue about the TV show, "PD Notebook". It involved investigative journalists who used threats and their interviewees and hidden cameras in order to try to bring down Koreans' view of Hwang as a "god". Living in Korea, this stuff is all over the news.

So while we know now that Hwang had violated research ethics, so too did the journalists violate their own ethics.

Nationalism in Korea is pretty rampant, but it has not overwhelmed logic here quite as you put it.

Google for "PD Notebook" and you'll see what I'm yammering about.

Bullshit

[Seoulstriker]

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.

Re:Donation of eggs by staff = bad?

[devnulljapan]

Yes, this is bad, but I wonder why no-one really seems to care that Craig Venter [wikipedia.org] used his own sperm [nyud.net] for Celera's attempt on the human genome. Oh, and FWIW IAAGS (I Am a Genome Scientist) (That link above is a coralised link to this NYT article [nytimes.com]).

J. Hendrik Schon all over again!

[dr. loser]

Wow. I've read this story before - back when it was J. Hendrik Schon [wikipedia.org]faking experiments at Bell Labs [bell-labs.com], with his collaborators eventually stuck with retracting 17 Science and Nature papers.

The similarities are incredibly striking, including (according to the New Scientist [newscientist.com]) 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?

Scientific American

[nneonneo]

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 :(