Next Up in the Hwang Saga: Was the Data Cooked?

Nicholas Wade at the New York Times is finally giving this story about stem cell research in Dr. Hwang's lab in South Korea the attention it was bound to receive in American media. And this story is going to change the way that Americans perceive stem cell researchers, who until now have been viewed as unmitigated heroes. Ironic in a way, because American stem cell researchers have almost without exception led the way in calling for regulation and responsible conduct of research.

This scandal is as we argued in our column the paradigm case of what will happen in this field if the U.S. does not step up to the plate to assert clear and concise rules at the level of the NIH and FDA to ensure that irresponsible research practices cannot result in clinical trials or drugs that go to market in this country.

If that sounds imperialist to you, you need to wake up - the U.S. will spend more on the transplants, drugs and devices that come from stem cell research than any other nation, and our capacity to provide standards to make that research responsible is the world's most important piece of leverage against scientific misconduct. The fact that there are strict laws against irresponsible stem cell research in Italy or Cuba or Nigeria just doesn't matter at all.

Anyway here's what happened today, just as Dr. Hwang was apparently having a major operation to deal with his ulcer. It is the most serious charge against Hwang's group yet. If substantiated it would mean the total collapse of the Korean effort.

The newest questions about the paper concern DNA fingerprint tests carried out to prove that the embryonic stem cell colonies were indeed derived from the patient in question. The test, demanded by referees for Science, was necessary because cell colonies often get mixed up or overgrown by other cells in even the best laboratories.

Usually any two DNA fingerprint traces will have peaks of different heights and alignment and different background noise. But in several cases the pairs of traces in the Science article seem identical in all three properties, suggesting that they are the same trace and not, as represented, two independent ones.

If so, there could have been yet another innocent mixing up of data, as seems to have been the case with duplicate photos - an error that came to light earlier this week. But it is also possible that the cell colonies never existed and that a single DNA fingerprint from a patient was falsely represented as two traces, one from the patient and one from the embryonic cell line allegedly derived from him.