I must admit I’m in “shock and awe” over the slow-motion implosion of the stem cell breakthroughs reported just months ago by Woo Suk Hwang’s lab in South Korea, and their collaborators. At this point, it seems nobody really understands what exactly went wrong, and certainly nobody knows if any part of the group’ s landmark May 2005 Science paper will stand.

First their ethics in procuring human egg cells came under scrutiny, precipitated by Pittsburgh co-author Gerald Schatten’s very sudden and very public declaration in November to sever his collaboration with the Koreans. Personally, I wasn’t too worried about these allegations, given that egg donors in the West are routinely paid to undergo the donation procedure for fertility clinic purposes. I remember well the regular ads in student papers that offered large sums of money for the eggs of those super SAT score high achievers…

But now the data reported in that paper are also under suspicion and, shockingly, the authors cannot produce the 11 cloned human stem cells lines they reported. A fungal contamination killed them, says Hwang, but some cell lines may yet be stored frozen, and could be used to verify their claims. We shall see… Hwang’s collaborator (and co-author on the paper!) Sung Il Roh has in television interviews (!!) alleged last week that data for the landmark Science paper were fabricated and possibly no cloned stem cell lines were ever derived from patients.

Both Science and Nature have put up timelines on their websites (here and here), where anyone interested can try to untangle the mess for themselves.

The most reasonable voice last week came from a group surrounding Dolly-the-sheep creator Ian Wilmut, who in a letter to Science offer to analyze the Hwang group’s cell lines as a means of independent verification. Of course, at this point it is not clear whether there are any cell lines left for them to analyze! Hwang and Schatten have asked Science to retract the paper, but still need to collect signatures from all their 25 or so co-authors…

The fallout of this disaster, for stem cell research and its public support, will be huge – not only in Korea.