Rick Weiss reports this morning that Gerald P. Schatten, who has taken the lead in American collaboration with Korea’s leader in stem cell research, has pulled out of that collaboration because of what he referred to as ethical breaches and lies.
Now folks, this is a big deal.
The allegation – which has in the last week become a huge scandal in Korea – involves the way that Hwang and his colleagues obtained the eggs that they used in making the embryos from which they harvested stem cells:
For many months after Hwang’s 2004 publication, rumors had spread in scientific circles that the eggs Hwang used to achieve that landmark result had been taken from a junior scientist in his lab. That situation, if true, would be in violation of widely held ethics principles that preclude people in positions of authority from accepting egg donations from underlings. The rules are meant to prevent subtle — or not-so-subtle — acts of coercion.
Questions have also circulated as to whether the woman received illegal payments for her role.
Schatten said that Hwang had repeatedly denied the rumor and that he had believed Hwang until yesterday. “I now have information that leads me to believe he had misled me,” Schatten said. “My trust has been shaken. I am sick at heart. I am not going to be able to collaborate with Woo Suk.”
So what, you might say, if one Korean researcher makes a mistake and it leads to the discontinuation of one partnership between a group in Seoul and a guy from Pittsburgh. Well it is much bigger than that.
The impact of the continuing catastrophe with the Hwang lab is not, of course, because he used cloning to create Snuppy the dog.
Hwang’s work has been revolutionary in the scientific quest to do ‘therapeutic cloning’ – to use nuclear transfer in order to make embryonic stem cell lines, and to do it more efficiently and faster than anyone thought possible. He has made them in strange ways, to be sure, such as deriving the somatic cells from six-year olds.
And Hwang is a symbol – big time. We pointed in October to the unmitigated praise for his ‘Korean work ethic’, which many have cited as the reason for his incredible success. And we noted that he alone has made progress with the Catholic church on how to proceed with the research. Anyone who was paying attention to that moment would have to note the stark contrast between Hwang’s careful approach and that of those in the United States who have instead decided to play semantic games or do bizzare science in order to avoid the debate.
He alone received more money from the Korean government than the U.S. government has given out everyone put together for research using the President’s approved stem cell lines.
But most – including Schatten – believed that the bulk of his research involved derivation of stem cell lines from materials that had been properly donated under careful scrutiny. What do I mean by ‘most’? Well, to put it in a nutshell, Woo Suk’s effort has just last month culminated in the announcement that his team plans to create hundreds of stem cell lines every year. Many of us in bioethics, though, quietly took notice that while the Schatten group – who had been working with Hwang for a while – linked up early and consistently with Hwang, other major stem cell researchers were cautious. And when the big explosion happened in Korea last week, it became clear that the Pitt agreement with Hwang was doomed.
I would have said – and in fact most major news and technology magazines have written – that Hwang’s team has become the one to beat in the ‘stem cell race’, and that his efforts to think about ethics of stem cell research were unmatched even among the California scientists who must now create and follow highly complex regulations about egg donation.
But if Hwang has misled Schatten, the Korean government, the Catholic church – who really went the distance in listening to and trusting him, and the people in his lab, it will be tragic in a way that vastly exceeds the simple violations of research ethics.
Hwang, I fear, could firmly establish in the public mind the view that stem cell researchers as a group cannot be trusted, not only because they are in a hurry and miss things along the way, but because they may be willing to deceive their own peers and the public about their devotion to ethics. Stem cell researchers do good work, and many of them are very thoughtful about the controversy that attends it. But the bar is higher. Embryonic stem cell research, research that involves the donation of eggs, and particularly research that involves therapeutic cloning simply demands that scientists show the utmost respect to everyone involved and the utmost trustworthiness about how they proceed.
November hasn’t been a good month for embryonic stem cell research. First the all-too-clever Nature article about how to dodge the stem cell debate, then the appearance of profound misconduct at the core of the work of the key scientist involved in producing new stem cell lines. If this doesn’t prove that there needs to be an Ethical, Legal and Social Issues program for stem cell research, I cannot imagine what would. And in the meantime, it is going to be a rough few months for the Korean stem cell research effort. – Glenn McGee
[thanks Art Caplan]
[update: a comment below “from Seoul” doubts the sincerity of Hwang’s efforts in that regard and points out that there has been skepticism from bioethicists in Korea about “his integrity” for some time; I also heard this from Seon Kui Erica Lee this weekend at this conference at McGill where I was speaking. None of this changes the point, though.]
[update: Hwang responds through a spokesperson in the Korea Times; he says all will be revealed soon, that he has been back bitten before, and that the pullout of Schatten will not affect their work because other Americans will be happy to collaborate.]