Stem cell breakthrough may be phony

Problems are mounting for star South Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk. Last month, he admitted to violating ethical standards by getting some of his research eggs from lower-level female scientists. Now there are allegations that he faked his landmark research paper that was published in the journal Science in June. That paper claimed that Hwang’s team cloned human embryos and extracted stem cell lines that matched the DNA of patients.
Stem cell research holds great promise, but with so much money poised to pour into this research (including the $3 billion in grants approved by California voters last year), there is also a lot of temptation to hype and fake the findings.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee

6 Comments

  1. J M Walker
    Posted December 15, 2005 at 2:07 pm | Permalink

    If stem cells can be cloned, that would be a major breakthrough. It would eliminate the need for stem cells “harvested (damn, I hate that word used in this context) from aborted children.

  2. Jed
    Posted December 15, 2005 at 2:35 pm | Permalink

    Righ now, we need to be looking at all the ways stem cells can be used, and all the sources for them. We don’t have the luxury of nit-picking when there are people suffering!

  3. J M Walker
    Posted December 15, 2005 at 2:37 pm | Permalink

    Jed:You are correct: It’s the aborted children who are suffering, and their time has been reduced to “Harvesting”

  4. Jed
    Posted December 15, 2005 at 2:45 pm | Permalink

    JM,A clump of stem cells is suffering? Come on man, get your head out of your ideological ass and look around! Real people are in real trouble from real diseases, and you are standing there saying they should keep on suffering on principle? Grow a heart!

  5. J M Walker
    Posted December 15, 2005 at 3:00 pm | Permalink

    Jed,You fail to see that others have different opinions. My opinion is that using aborted children is morally bankrupt.

    My opinion is also that if stem cells can be cloned than the use of aborted children for those same stem cells can be halted.

    So my heart is very well and comfortable in its place.

    From what I can gather from your post, which says very little, is that we should be aborting more children to feed the stem cell frenzy. Who has a heart now?

  6. Jed
    Posted December 15, 2005 at 7:07 pm | Permalink

    JM,How is it morally bankrupt to use frozen embryos (at a stage where they’re simply a clump of undifferentiated cells) left over from in vitro fertilization, and destined to be thrown away, to help someone in pain?Stem cells from adults have been shown to have problems. Those problems may, in the future, be overcome, but to wait until that happens to get started is a cruel and unnecessary delay for people who are ill now! That, of course, doesn’t seem to bother the christian ideologues, who think everything revolves around abortion.And if you think abortion’s bad, wait until cloning becomes practical- the moral problems you have with that will be offset by the morality of not cloning, if you continue with your present line of reasoning, and you’ll be forced to descend from the untenable into the absurd. Wouldn’t it be better to rethink your position before that happens?