In a letter published yesterday, Drs. Insoo Hyun and Kyu Won Jung, who authored “Oocyte and Somatic Cell Procurement for Stem Cell Research” in the most recent issue of AJOB, the authors express concern regarding that manuscript. The letter in its entireity follows:
To the Editor,
In our article, Oocyte and Somatic Cell Procurement for Stem Cell Research: The South Korean Experience, we outlined and defended the informed consent procedures that we reported that Dr. Jung designed for the Hwang teams 2005 patient-specific stem cell study. In our article, we claimed that the Hwang team followed these rigorous informed consent procedures to procure eggs and somatic cells for their 2005 stem cell research.However, on December 16, 2005, we began to doubt whether the Hwang team had actually used any of these eggs and somatic cells to generate data for their 2005 Science study. Our doubts were raised by some of Dr. Hwangs remarks during his press conference that same day and also by the two to three month timeline now widely acknowledged by scientists to be necessary to culture new stem cell lines.
Our first concern was that the timeline for the volunteers egg and somatic cell donations did not match the timeline necessary for the Hwang team to produce data for their March 15 article submission to Science. The process we described was not in place prior to January 23, 2005.
Furthermore, Dr. Hwang publicly declared that several patient-specific stem cell lines were contaminated on January 9, 2005, which would suggest that the team performed some of their cloning research well before to the activation of Jungs informed consent procedures. We reported our concerns immediately to a member of the Hanyang Hospital IRB and the leadership of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) and its bioethics committee.
On December 23, 2005, the SNU investigative body announced not only that the Hwang team had fabricated their data, but that they had also used far more eggs than they had initially reported to Science. These extra eggs most certainly were not procured through our described informed consent procedures. Indeed, we wonder whether any of the eggs and somatic cells donated through our informed consent procedures were ever used for research. If not, then Hwang and colleagues may have allowed egg donors to expose themselves to risk needlessly. So, in addition to the problems of the Hwang teams scientific integrity, serious ethical charges of informed consent must now be explored.
We are extremely disappointed by the evidence of the Hwang teams scientific and ethical misconduct. However, we remain steadfast in our belief that the informed consent procedures we describe in our article are ethically rigorous and that they provide a useful starting point for developing tough guidelines for tissue procurement for stem cell research. Unfortunately, we were led to believe that the Hwang team had actually used these procedures to produce the patient-specific stem cell lines they reported to Science.
-Insoo Hyun and Kyu Won Jung