In May, Woo Suk Hwang, South Korea鈥檚 鈥渒ing of cloning鈥�, announced that his team had made embryonic stem cells (ESCs) that were genetically tailored to individual patients and had the potential to develop into any tissue or organ in the body. The world bowed.
Hwang was no stranger to stem cell glory, as he had already shown he could create cloned embryonic stem cells. However, many had doubted the efficiency of his technique, which requires an adult cell and an egg, and it had taken 242 eggs to create just one ESC line. But Hwang answered the doubters by repeating the procedure, this time with unprecedented efficiency: he made 11 ESC lines from 185 fresh eggs donated by ostensibly unpaid volunteers 鈥� only 17 eggs were needed per ESC line.
In August, Hwang became the first to clone a dog 鈥� an Afghan hound he named Snuppy, for Seoul National University puppy. He couldn鈥檛 put a foot wrong.
Advertisement
Then came the fall from grace. In November, Hwang admitted that some of the eggs his lab used had been obtained from women in his own research group. This ran counter to international ethical guidelines and Hwang admitted lying about it when questioned. What鈥檚 more, other donors had been paid for the eggs, even though his paper claimed otherwise. Hwang resigned as the boss of the World Stem Cell Hub, a repository set up to share stem-cell lines and cloning technology.
Finally, this month, several researchers, including some in South Korea, raised questions about Hwang鈥檚 science. Under fire, he admitted irregularities in his data, and has asked for his May paper to be retracted from the journal Science. More is at stake than Hwang鈥檚 reputation: the already controversial field of stem-cell science is at risk of being brought into disrepute.
And here are all of New Scientist鈥檚 roundup stories for 2005.
