Now comes word that the famed South Korean stem-cell researcher
Hwang Wu-suk, who attracted so much attention earlier this year,
faked his results. His close collaborator Roh Sung-Il says that the
stem cells that Hwang claims to have cloned probably do not exist.
He also said that leading authors of the paper have notified the
journal Science that they were withdrawing the paper.
Science said it had not yet heard from Hwang.
Professor Hwang’s work, originally published by Science
in June, was hailed as a breakthrough — a “tremendous advance,”
according to Stanford University Nobelist Paul Berg. It was also
used as an object lesson for retrograde American politicians —
read President Bush — who had thrown up ethical obstacles to such
important research by restricting federal funding. Americans were
being left in the dust by go-ahead scientists from around the world
who were not hamstrung by medieval qualms and superstitions, we
were warned.
I discuss the South Korean work in my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science,
published recently by Regnery. I also discuss the history of fraud
in the field of cloning more generally.
If Prof. Hwang’s claims had been validated, they would have been
important for the following reason. The stem-cell lines he said he
had created were genetically matched to the donors’ DNA. Before
Hwang made his claims, embryonic stem-cell therapy was unlikely to
have succeeded because the transplanted tissue would likely have
been recognized as “foreign” and therefore rejected by the
recipient’s immune system. But Hwang had obtained DNA from the
nucleus of cells of prospective patients, and the resulting stem
cells would be transplanted back into these donors. Ergo, there
would be no rejection (ran the theory).
Now, it seems that these stem cells never existed. If so, it
will be back to the drawing boards for everyone.
At this writing, Prof. Hwang is refusing to say what really
happened. But if fraud is confirmed it will be a major setback for
stem-cell research worldwide. The underlying science will probably
have to be reviewed from scratch. The problem of immune-system
rejection itself only became apparently quite recently, which is
why Hwang’s work was considered so important.
When I worked on the stem-cell chapter for my book, some
eyebrows were raised because I declined to take the view, often
adopted by conservatives, that it was the ethics of
stem-cell research that needed to be questioned; the science, we
should concede, was no doubt valid and above reproach.
But I had already spoken to two scientists who were familiar
with work in the stem-cell field and both had told me the same
thing: that the difficulties involved in “coaxing” stem cells to
become specialized cells of the body were very great. In fact, one
told me, embryologists had been trying for over a hundred years to
understand how the cells of the developing body manage to do this
in the normal course of gestation. They were unlikely to find the
answer by studying these cells in isolation, or because there was
political pressure to do so, or because they would be rewarded by
newspaper headlines.
I therefore decided to focus on the science, which clearly had
not reached the stage where it could solve these problems. The
ethics could be left for another day.
The basic scientific question that must now be discussed, in
reference both to embryonic stem-cell research and to the related
field of cloning is this: Can these laboratory demonstrations or
claims be repeated by others? This is the most basic feature of the
scientific method. An experiment done by one scientist is supposed
to be repeatable by another. It might not matter so much that Dr.
Hwang’s results were faked, if indeed they were, if other
laboratories had independently managed to get the same results. But
they have not been able to do so yet.
Dr. Hwang’s lab in South Korea also succeeded in cloning a dog
for the first time, as reported in Nature earlier this
year. It was named Snuppy. Hwang and his researchers “worked for
nearly three years, seven days a week, 365 days a year and used
1095 eggs from 122 dogs before finally succeeding,” the New
York Times reported. The painstaking creation of more than
1,000 laboratory-grown embryos “led to the birth of just two cloned
puppies — one of which died after three weeks,” the Washington
Post added.
By that criterion, as I said in my book, “animal cloning is more
trial-and-error than science.”
Has anyone been able to repeat this work with dogs? It’s not
clear that they have. The Post’s Rick Weiss reported that
Hwang’s manual dexterity under the microscope was the secret of his
success. This in turn Hwang attributed to “the Korean tradition of
eating food with difficult-to-master steel chopsticks.”
Hmmm. Maybe the Chinese will be able to carry on where the
Koreans left off. But it’s all beginning to look a little fishy, if
you ask me, and my advice is: If you read of any more claims about
therapeutic cloning and stem-cell breakthroughs, take them with a
pinch of salt.
