Stem cell debacle will taint science

WASHINGTON, Dec. 29 (UPI) -- The discovery that South Korea's prestigious researcher Hwang Woo-suk may have falsified results in the paper he published on stem cell research could have far-reaching impact on the field for a long time to come, health policy experts said this week.

The Korean debacle could even make it harder for the nascent technology to get funding in the future, they said.

At the center of the simmering controversy in an article published in the journal Science in May 2005.

Hwang, leader of the team that produced the world's first cloned dog and credited with bringing South Korea into the biomedical world arena with patient-tailored stem cells, was accused by his colleagues of deliberately fabricating results in the research that described how the stem cells were produced.

"This whole scandal is incredible given the scope of collusion that has to be involved," Glenn McGee, editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Bioethics, told United Press International McGee. "Even if it's a minor error or data was exaggerated to get the research to market, it's still likely that this will turn out to be not just a bad apple, but a poisoned apple."

An investigation into the allegations is being conducted by both Seoul National University and South Korea's Board of Audit and Investigation, that said it suspected government agencies collaborated in the cover up.

Reports from a variety of sources have revealed that, although the first set of questions addressed to Hwang concerned whether the egg donors in his experiments were paid or not, current questions center on whether there were in fact any patient-tailored stem cells lines at all.

McGee said that he was appalled by the potential consequences of Hwang's actions.

"The level of scientific fraud is unprecedented because it involves so many co-conspirators and a separate commercial dimension. It doesn't just tarnish science, it's going to expose science to the charge of crass commercialism."

McGee said he thought Hwang's mistakes would change the way peer-reviewers for scientific journals all over the world verify data, and badly damage future stem cell funding opportunities.

"The Korean investigators were able to work in this complicated field where there's no federal money only because they could persuade venture capitalists that their investments were safe with them," McGee explained. "These events may be the undoing of a variety of government/corporate scientific partnerships and will make it even harder to raise already scarce funds for stem cell research," he said.

"The people it will hurt the worst are the folks in the tiny, very vulnerable companies who are doing the actual start-up work in the field," McGee predicted.

Roe Jung-hye, the chief of Seoul National University's research office, said at a televised news conference that the university would use several techniques, including DNA fingerprinting, to determine whether the basic findings in the Science paper were true or not.

Meanwhile, Science announced that Hwang had asked the journal to retract his paper several weeks ago, when questions were raised about the egg donors. Editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy issued the following statement on December 29, explaining why the retraction process was taking so long.

"There is no question in our minds that the stem-cell paper published

19 May 2005 by the journal Science needs to be retracted, and we are

proceeding swiftly but appropriately in that direction. As of this

writing, however, editors at Science still have not received any

official notification from Seoul National University regarding the

interim findings just reported in the press, and so we have sent a

message to the head of the investigation, Dr. Roe Jung-hye, seeking more

information. Science also is continuing to try and gather all authors'

signatures for the retraction agreement."

McGee told UPI he felt a number of factors had created South Korea's current problems.

"Unfortunately, when you have extreme funding mechanisms, insufficient oversight, excessive pressure, a crazy confederation of authors and institutions, and confusion about patents, nothing good can result," McGee said. "When you add a lab in Korea that isn't subject to any of the laws most countries have for verifying data and a data interpreter who doesn't speak Korean, it's a recipe for disaster," he said.

"There's always a lot of this sausage making in frontier research and it's always odious," McGee added. "I guess we know what they'll teach from now on in Korean scientific ethics classes."