Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

Hwang’s back!

Korea’s disgraced cloning researcher, Woo-suk Hwang is apparently back in the lab, according to an exclusive from the Associated Press.

The article says Hwang and 30 of his former colleagues have set up shop outside Seoul and are hard at work deriving stem cell lines from pig and cow embryos. One of the scientists is quoted as saying what a pity it is that they can’t get their hands on human eggs—to which my response is “Chuh!”

In case you’ve forgotten, Hwang is the scientist who sucecssfully hoodwinked the whole world into believing first that his team had successfully derived embryonic stem cells from a cloned human embryo and then that they had created 11 patient-specific stem cell lines from people with different diseases. And they claimed to have done all this using eggs from willing volunteers, 242 eggs the first time and 185 the second.

It was all a big scam, of course. Much to everyone’s utter shock, there were no such cell lines. And and as it turned out later, Hwang had in fact used more than 2,000 eggs, and in many cases had either paid, duped or coerced women—including two graduate students in his lab—into donating them.

What I’m still shocked by is these 30 scientists who are still putting their faith in him. But maybe I shouldn’t be. Hwang was so good at seeming like the humble man of science, even playing the Asian card at times, that no one suspected a thing for years.

My colleague at Nature, David Cyranoski, first reported the ethical violations in May 2004, a year and a half before Hwang’s collaborator Gerald Schatten raised an alarm. During that time, most scientists believed that Nature had cooked up the allegations over jealousy that Hwang had chosen to publish in Science, a theory Hwang himself had floated. But as I reported in May 2005, some people in Korea saw him as a two-faced manipulator who “sells himself very well,” long before the West caught on.

It’s disturbing to see that Hwang still hasn’t given up on human eggs and cloning. Here’s hoping the government makes sure he he has to stick to pigs and cows.

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