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Hwang Suk-woo on Thursday admitted using fake data in his articles on stem cells derived from cloned embryos but insisted that researchers at MizMedi Hospital, a fertility clinic in Seoul, duped him by feeding him falsified data. "My team's technical edge is unrivaled in the world in cloning human embryos,¡± he said, and claimed the team could produce legitimate patient-tailored stem cells in about six months given the right circumstances. It is up to the prosecution in the coming months to reveal if any of that is true.
It was Hwang¡¯s fourth public appearance at a press conference since November last year, when an MBC program first cast doubts on the team¡¯s ethics in procuring human eggs for research. He has taken these occasions to tell us that he knew nothing of irregularities in occyte procurement, that inflating data from two cells to make it look as if there were 11 was no big deal, and that patient-specific stem cell were switched but the ¡°source technology¡± to grow them from cloned embryos exists.
Here is a man who earlier boasted his team opened ¡°four heavy gates¡± in stem cell research all at once, and ¡°only a few screen doors¡± are left before a cure for incurable diseases is at hand. "We have planted our national flag on the hill of world bioengineering," he crowed. In all, he has given the impression that his field of activity was less the laboratory, as befits a scientist, but a podium where he could address the masses.
Granted, the scope of science is such that scientists now need communication skills so they can persuade the public to fund their research. But this scientist set up the World Stem Cell Hub and accepted registrations from 20,000 patients with incurable diseases in what looks like nothing so much as an attempt to exploit the needs of the desperate for his personal benefit.
He smartly stoked popular sentiment by saying, "Science knows no borders but a scientist should have a nationality,¡± roping in political heavyweights who hoped to cadge some profit of their own from his stem cell research. Why did he donate anywhere between W500,000 (US$500) and W1 million each to legislators who had no direct relation to science? This unholy alliance between science and politics bears more than a small part of the responsibility for the scandal.
Science is the often tedious process of meticulous step-by-step accumulation of small discovery upon small discovery, many unnoticed by the world, and of subjecting them to verification. Our scientific community should remember that progress is achieved through hard toil in the laboratory, not in the public arena.
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