Dr. Hwang Enters the Twilight Zone

Happy new year. Unless you are Hwang Woo-suk. Ulcers and mixed up cell lines are nothing compared to the January he is about to have. Korea Times has the most damning report yet about his research, posted Saturday, which reads as follows:

Prof. Hwang Woo-suk plagiarized his subordinate’s work on the first-ever cloned human embryonic stem cells that was featured in the U.S. journal Science in early 2004, some scientists argued Friday. The scientists contend a stem cell photo featured in the 2004 paper partially overlaps that of an article in another journal Stem Cells that was authored in 2003 by Kim Son-jong, a member of Hwang’s team.

This means the 2004 paper may also have been fabricated and Hwang’s team has no original technologies in therapeutic cloning, a process that opens the possibility of curing currently incurable diseases. In fact, some scientists both at home and abroad have already raised questions about the 2004 paper, contending the DNA fingerprint traces documented in the article were fabricated.

And as we discussed earlier the role of the Korean government in what amounts to a coverup on behalf of Hwang began early and reached a fever pitch just last week, with an agency pushing Seoul National University to suppress information about the ongoing investigation.

I am interviewed at length for a wire service piece on the importance of the collusion in this case, though I am misquoted bigtime: "The Korean investigators were able to work in this complicated field where there's no federal money only because they could persuade venture capitalists that their investments were safe with them." Uh, no. The point I actually made was that American researchers who have no access to federal dollars and are thus funded by VC are at new risk because the VC people will see the Korean matter as evidence that this is an even riskier investment than was otherwise obvious. But otherwise it is a decent piece about the real issues here - not simply telling the truth but setting up a system in which mistakes can be more easily averted.