Word: hwang
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MizMedi's Roh, meanwhile, says that after a visit to Hwang at the hospital, he was convinced that "there are no embryonic stem cells." In response to Hwang's retraction, the university finally launched its investigation and announced last week that there is no evidence that any of the stem-cell lines Hwang claimed he had derived from adult cells ever existed (the full report is expected in mid-January). Until any further rulings come down--from the university's continuing inquiry or from the prosecutors, who are also looking into Hwang's allegations of cell switching at MizMedi--that...
...happened is still a mystery. By all accounts, the tales of Hwang's dedication and personal discipline are all true. Hwang was one of the first to arrive in the lab, at 5 a.m., and rarely left before midnight. He rejected the role of aloof, inaccessible scientist to become a father-like figure for his young charges. And he introduced some genuine innovations into the science of cloning--gently squeezing the nucleus out of a donor egg rather than sucking it out violently and inserting the entire adult cell, not just its nucleus, into the hollowed-out recipient egg. Hwang...
That being the case, it seems unlikely that Hwang set out to perpetrate fraud. But it wouldn't be surprising if he, or someone in his lab, believed strongly enough in the work to be willing to cut corners. If that's true, the precipitating event could have come last January, when some of his stem-cell samples became contaminated, possibly by a fungus circulating in poorly shielded air vents...
...Hwang claims it took six months to recover from the disaster. But it also might be that Hwang's team couldn't recover quickly enough and began taking shortcuts to fill the gap. Under pressure from the government and the university, and with a deadline looming for publication in one of the world's most prestigious journals, the temptation to stretch the truth might have been irresistible. "I can only speculate that Dr. Hwang was driven by ambition. He may have thought he could manipulate the data to secure research funding and compensate for his actions with follow-up results...
...Hwang's case, it may be that mistakes were made or frauds committed without his knowledge, but as head of the research team and lead author of the published results, he's stuck with the responsibility. No matter what the investigation concludes about his two other landmark papers, Hwang will be remembered for the fiasco that embarrassed his university and the South Korean government--and deepened the public's unease and ambivalence about stem cells and human cloning...