And the Korean Mess Continues

And the Korean Mess Continues

Now the Korean stem cell issues are turning melodramatic. The junior researcher who donated her ova for Hwang’s cloning research has vanished (from the Korean point of view) somewhere in the US. She had been at the University of Pittsburgh to work with Dr. Schatten and was supposed to return November 17, but has not had contact with the researchers at Seoul National University. According to Chosun Ilbo,

Park Eul-soon is a researcher who holds knowledge of key techniques for the removal of an egg cell’s nucleus and transferring the nucleus of somatic cell into the egg cell. The researcher made a key contribution to the extraction of a stem cell line from the world's first cloned human embryo, the subject of a Hwang article in Science. The researcher was then dispatched to collaborate with Prof. Schatten's research team at the University of Pittsburgh. Park also played a crucial role in generating cloned monkey embryos.

There is concern in Korea that Park may “leak” important technical knowledge to American researchers.

Meanwhile, according to both the Korea Times and the JoongAng Daily, the Korean television station MBC is investigating Hwang’s research and says that it has proof that some of the results may have been fabricated. The JoongAng Daily reports that producers of a documentary at MBC have said that “MBC asked two institutions to analyze DNA of five embryonic stem cells that allegedly came from Dr. Hwang's lab. Some of those cells, however, did not have identical DNA to their original somatic cells.” According to the Korea Times, these claims are being met with skepticism by other scientists, who believe the review process by the journal Science was thorough.

Hwang is presently in seclusion at a temple, according to another Korea Times article.

The fall-out is still happening, so it is hard to draw conclusions on what will happen next. There are numerous articles on the subject that you can find in Google News if you are further interested. I would personally be very surprised if the research were false: A) I trust the magazine Science to do a better job than many places, and certainly better than unidentified institutions approached by a TV station; and B) successful cloning of other animals has been done, and I don’t believe people are fundamentally different on a biological basis.

As for Park—one would venture to guess that she saw the writing on the wall when Schatten withdrew from collaboration with Hwang, and has decided that the US is a safer (and perhaps more private) place to be. There are many possible permutations of this, and I don’t think it’s fair to her to speculate further.

And the moral of the story is that people will be people, and science can’t occur outside of the human condition.