NYT Editorial on "South Korea's Cloning Crisis"

Shiny by Noli Novak via Flickr

Continued fall out of Dr. Hwang Woo Suk's use of his underlings' eggs for stem cell research.

How harshly Dr. Hwang should be judged for such transgressions is a matter of dispute... But what really torpedoed Dr. Hwang was the cover-up: his repeated lies to the effect that his eggs were donated by unpaid volunteers. These misrepresentations led his most prominent American collaborator to sever ties because his trust had been shaken.

Actually I believe Dr. Hwang has only admitted to ignorance of these problems.

Christopher Reeve's Last Public Speech
at Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago

The key unresolved issue is whether lying about egg donations suggests that the Korean team may have lied about its scientific results... American collaborators and observers remain confident that the team's achievements were real. But science is an enterprise that relies heavily on trust. The Koreans should not be surprised if their next scientific breakthrough is greeted with extreme caution.

I'm afraid NYT is being a bit harsh here. Is one research group's actions to taint the scientific output of one Department? University? An entire Country?

While their personalities are apparently disparate, I like to compare Prof Hwang with our own Dr. Craig Venter. Both scientists of vision. Both ostracized for the source of their research raw material. (Recall the human genome sequenced by Celera/Applera was Venter's own)


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Science / Hwang Woo Suk / Stem cell research / Politics in academia