Posted by Natalie DeWitt for Monya Baker
South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang actually did achieve an important first, just not the one he claimed. I was at the meeting where Hwang said, falsely, that he’d created the first human embryonic stem cell through cloning. It felt like a rock concert, except attendees held up recorders instead of lighters.
It turns out that Hwang might have gotten some rock-star status just by sticking to the truth. The human embryonic stem cells he made came from a parthenote, or an activated, unfertilized egg, and he really did do it first. George Daley, a stem cell scientist from Children’s Hospital, Boston, announced this fact to an absolutely packed crowd in an exhibit hall at the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Cairns, Australia. That Hwang’s line came from a parthenote had been suspected, but this line of evidence hadn’t been presented before.
(Last year, Tiziana Brevini and Fulvio Gandolfi of the University of Milan announced that they had derived two stem cell lines from 104 eggs that had been donated to fertility clinics. The news story is here: https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7097/full/4411038a.html)
Over a year and a half ago, everyone assumed that cloning human embryonic stem cells had been reduced to practice. Now, Hwang is a symbol for the biggest scientific fraud so far this century.
Daley described how embryonic stem cells derived from parthenotes could generate transplant tissue less subject to immune rejection, and I think about how when I bump in from stem cell scientists from South Korea, they tend to bring up Hwang in the first few sentences. They have done nothing wrong, but they still seem embarrassed. Had Hwang simply stuck to his real achievement, they would be proud.
(In a subsequent post, I’ll describe Daley’s work comparing how embryonic stem cells made through cloning differ from their parthenote-derived equivalents.)
