See, I don’t understand this. It sounds like he started with a premise, and manipulated the research to support his theory. As I understand it, the scientific community is small and your reputation is everything. He has lost all credibility. Why would he risk that for something he knew was not true? Does he even have a future any more? And what effect will this have on future cloning research, beyond more heightened scrutiny of the methodology?
If he’s a cloning scientist, why go to all this trouble? Why not just copy someone else’s work?
Sailboat
Weird. I just finished reading about this guy (among others) in an article about stem cells. And the VERY NEXT DAY I hear about him on NPR as I’m waking up.
This guy screwed up big time. He must have been under some serious pressure to produce results. Otherwise, I can’t imagine why he’d risk everything on something that would actually harm his cause in the long run.
Your title is misleading. He never directly admits to any wrongdoing. The most apparently damning information in the article comes from the university where he did his research. Hwang himself says he has done nothing wrong, aside from some ostensibly honest errors:
This is a far cry from admitting outright fraud.
Really – sounds like someone got put on the spot to spin the straw into gold NOW “or else”. Though it doesn’t really make good sense – projects of all sorts are shut down all over the academic community all the time and it’s not considered a disgrace; and financially, if your “breakthrough” is phony your backers lose their money anyway.
The key question would be if they put themselves on that spot or someone else did. I’d be worried about the heat being focused to Hwang and his team at the detail level, or at the science of stem cells and cloning in general, when it’s possible there may have been other financial, political, or academic-establishment “players” besides the team, that may have held a stake on these results being published (e.g. announce a “breakthrough” in time to assure new funding, or passage of favorable legislation, or a rise in genetic engineering stocks).
He’s hardly the first person to lie without thoroughly thinking through the consequences. When the inducement is world-wide fame and funding, and the contrary arguement is that sometime in the future someone might find you out and might go public with that knowledge and you might not have had a chance to cook the books – well, has anyone heard of this company called Enron?
Obviously some of his claims are real - he has, in fact, created some human embryonic stem cell lines - but the rest of it is up for grabs despite his current assertion that there was no actual fraud. He originally claimed that he did not get junior members of the lab to donate oocytes, but that has turned out to be untrue. He also claimed that all of the oocyte donors were volunteers, which became obviously untrue, then he backed down and claimed that he didn’t know they were paid for. During the above scandals he claimed his work was solid, and now he’s backing down and claiming it was “premature”. It looks to me like he’s a liar and he’s backing down inch by inch as the new data hits him.
Also, it doesn’t make any sense for him to have faked the number of cloned cell lines he created. ANY number of cloned cell lines would have made him famous. I think we’re all going to see more of his data fall apart.
mischievous
Note: I am a research biologist in a lab that works with (mouse) embryonic stem cells, so I keep half an eye on this stuff, but this isn’t really my field and I have no inside info. Take with salt.