The Korea Herald reports that researcher Park Eul-soon, the researcher who went into utter seclusion in Pittsburgh in November, has re-emerged on MBC television – a network so dedicated to exposing the corruption of Hwang Woo-suk at the peak of his popularity that a month ago its reporters were scared to tell cab drivers to take them to the studio.
This expose is by far the most serious in the short but ignoble history of Hwang’s fraud:
An investigative program is set to air today and is expected to report that one of his junior researchers was coerced into donating her eggs.
The researcher, Park Eul-soon, wrote in an e-mail that she was forced to contribute her eggs after mistakenly spilling ova used for experiments in 2003.
“I regret that I did not stand up to Dr. Hwang,” MBC television station quoted her as saying in the e-mail.
Park had already said that she spilled ova, but in her prior account published elsewhere she had said she merely felt guilty. It is not clear that either MBC or the Korea Herald know that she had already said this, but ultimately the new claim is that she was point-blank pressured to give eggs.
We have followed Park’s odd history for some time – she was by all accounts instrumental in the research, and was hanging out in the Schatten lab when the scandal broke – with Schatten announcing that he suspected that there were issues with egg donation (which anyone from planet Duh might surmise he learned from Park).
And then, you’ll recall, she failed to show up at the airport in Seoul to meet the other South Koreans who were all forced to leave Pittsburgh immediately for South Korea, in a rush, immediately after the Schatten announcement and just hours before Seoul National University released a statement implying that Schatten was merely retaliating against Hwang because Schatten SNU would not let him have power, position and money. So SNU and some sketchy government people showed up – apparently, we later learned, bearing a cash bribe as well – to “check on her,” with one newspaper in Korea actually stating that they were trying to make sure she didn’t steal away with intellectual property from the project
She has still not resurfaced and is no doubt setting up an illegal cloning operation in Nebraska.
In other reports, the 2004 paper, which every reporter with an IQ above 100 has been describing as “now in doubt,” is still under investigation. But guess what. It really doesn’t matter anymore. See,
Hwang’s team claimed to have used 242 and 273 eggs, respectively in its research in 2004 and 2005 to clone human embryos derived from ova and somatic cells.
However … the number of human eggs “far exceeded” the number presented in the paper – possibly about 2,000.
And what that means is that even if the 2004 paper in fact holds up – and Hwang can produce cell lines from nuclear transfer – the 2005 fraud demonstrates that it takes an order of magnitude more eggs to do so than previously thought, and that sets the idea of routinizing the use of nuclear transfer-derived stem cells back considerably. World Stem Cell Bank? Better put the word “Disney’s” in front of it, and have little trains that pass by all the places where the fraud took place. Only the UK has anything remotely like the Korean endeavor, but it has different goals and much more intense oversight.
At any rate, the Hwang implosion is huge for Newcastle, which appears to have moved as far as Hwang, and with every bit as much care – publishing their accomplishment by press release rather than peer review.
The next step in damage control for nuclear transfer-based stem cell research has nothing to do with Hwang. It’s the good guys in the field. My cloning ethics collaborator and pal Ian Wilmut is doing great things, but he and Robert Lanza in particular have gone on somewhat poorly timed media campaigns, to discuss in Wilmut’s case how important it is to hurry up and get into clinical trials, and in Lanza’s case to suggest that Hwang will slow things down enough to kill thousands.
If part of the problem here is overheated rhetoric about stem cell research, the answer is not only slightly less overheated rhetoric about stem cell research. Let’s turn our attention to the question of funding all of stem cell research and use that opportunity to fiat some rock solid rules that any researcher who wants to work or sell products in the US will have to follow.
And from the “awakened from deep slumber” department, the President of Seoul National opened his New Year’s address to the campus by promising that he will take “serious disciplinary action against the universitys disgraced cloning expert Prof. Hwang Woo-suk over findings by an SNU panel that the veterinary professor fabricated groundbreaking research.” Given recent events one might ask whether or not he means it – after all, shortly after Hwang resigned from the world stem cell bank – as popular opinion swelled in his favor – he was essentially offered the chance to pull his resignation. But in this case, Hwang already quit. How do you discipline someone who has already quit? It is time for severe disciplinary action at SNU, but the President is optimistic if he thinks he will be the one doling it out.