Word: scientists
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When Woo Suk Hwang burst into international prominence back in 2004, seemingly out of nowhere, his story seemed too good to be true. Here was a poor Korean farm boy who had overcome his humble origins to become a leading veterinary scientist, and then gone on to achieve a scientific landmark: the first therapeutic cloning of a human embryo. That transformed him into a biomedical superstar and made his native South Korea--a country better known for its serial television dramas than its scientific accomplishments--into the undisputed leader of a technology that could revolutionize modern medicine...
...hard to find any scientist today who believes him. Even if Hwang's two remaining triumphs, Snuppy and the first human cloning, emerge untainted, urgent questions remain. How did his now invalidated stem-cell paper get into a major scientific journal? How did such serious flaws go undetected for months? And could he have knowingly taken such foolish risks...
...cells into a human egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed. After electrical fusion and chemical activation, the egg can then start dividing, creating embryonic stem cells. (If left to mature, the embryo could eventually grow into a clone of the original adult--something no reputable scientist would let happen...
...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...
...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," says Ki Jung Kim, a political scientist at Seoul's Yonsei University. In short, fudge it now, fix it later...