Science is known for rigorous self-policing by the research community, yet it can feel like scientific fraud is rampant. Why do fraudsters think they can get away with it?
The story of Hwang Woo-suk, a South Korean scientist who gained notoriety for claiming to clone human embryos, provides clues. After leaving the field in disgrace, Dr. Hwang has landed in clover, and now spends his days cloning beauty show and racing camels for United Arab Emirates royalty.
Dr. Hwang’s story is re-entering the public eye nearly 20 years after his fall from grace with two new documentaries, on Netflix and YouTube. His improbable career should prompt reassessment of popular assumptions about the effectiveness of science’s supposed self-correcting system, and recognition of the ways in which it can fail to deter or discipline misconduct.
Dr. Hwang burst into the spotlight in 2004 when he reported success in making an embryonic human clone and deriving stem cells from it. This was the proof-of-principle for the once-hyped “therapeutic cloning” — in which patients’ own cells, from the skin or other tissue, could be used to create embryonic stem cells with their genetic signature, which could then be used to treat diseases.
The distance to the clinic shrank with Dr. Hwang’s 2005 follow-up study. The team claimed to have made embryonic stem cells from nine patients using a much more efficient protocol than the previous report. The apparent breakthrough won Dr. Hwang widespread acclaim. South Korea named him a “supreme scientist” and released a postage stamp to celebrate his achievement.
But all was not well in the clone factory, as Dr. Hwang’s lab at Seoul National University had come to be known. As a journalist covering his ascendance for Nature, I was the first to report ethical breaches involving the team’s sourcing of human eggs.
Eggs are a critical part of cloning, and Dr. Hwang’s prodigious supply, which he claimed were from unpaid volunteers, was what set him apart from other scientists. But during an interview, a graduate student in his lab told me that she and another student donated their own eggs to the research program.
Investigations after Hwang’s downfall revealed that the other student had performed the cloning attempts herself. “Though it was I who started it, I’m scared,” she wrote to a friend just before the procedure. “General anesthesia, self-cloning (it’s inconceivable? cloning using my own eggs? how tough I am).” She added, “I shouldn’t have done it this way, not giving up until the end, not standing up to the professor. I will work harder to forgive myself.” Other eggs were bought, which went against ethical guidelines.
Dr. Hwang denied wrongdoing. But months after his 2005 report, a courageous Korean news team provided evidence that stretched from unethical egg procurement to fraud. The journalists persevered despite threats, withdrawal of sponsors and finally cancellation of the program.
By the following year, both of Dr. Hwang’s once-heralded papers were retracted, the cloning factory was shut down and Dr. Hwang was indicted on a charge of fraud, violation of the country’s bioethics law and embezzlement. “This gentleman’s career and probably his life is ruined,” David Scadden, a doctor and acclaimed stem cell researcher at Harvard, told an American news program.
But a seemingly less important breakthrough by Dr. Hwang’s team, reported just before the human cloning story unraveled, held the keys to his future: the first cloning of a dog. Various other species, from sheep to mice, had been cloned, but domestic species such as cats and dogs had proven a challenge. With the largess bestowed on the Supreme Scientist, Dr. Hwang’s colleagues had succeeded, after more than 1,000 attempts, to bring a cloned Afghan hound puppy named Snuppy into the world.
In 2006, while investigations into the human stem cell cloning scandal were still underway, Dr. Hwang founded Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, a private dog-cloning enterprise, with financial support from his die-hard fans in industry. Its clientele included police K-9 units and bereaved pet owners. Business was good.
Over the next decade, Dr. Hwang’s name was associated with a string of animal cloning efforts, from various barnyard animals for ramped-up livestock breeding, to the genetic rescue of nearly extinct species like the Ethiopian wolf, to implausible attempts to bring actually extinct species such as the woolly mammoth back from the evolutionary graveyard.
Most of these projects seem to have fizzled. But they did return an air of authority to Dr. Hwang’s name.
In 2010, a beloved champion show camel in Abu Dhabi, named Mabrokan, suddenly died. Researchers in Dubai had reported the first cloned camel the previous year, and veterinarians in Abu Dhabi had the foresight to cryopreserve some testicular tissue and skin in the hope that they could find some cloning help.
In 2021, a group led by Dr. Hwang produced 11 clones of Mabrokan. The doctor now heads a state-of-the-art cloning laboratory in the desert around Abu Dhabi and lives in a villa on the grounds of a seven-star hotel where he takes daily swims.
There was another possible ending to this story — one in which Dr. Hwang’s fraudulent research was never retracted, he kept his academic post and he was remembered as the first to clone humans for therapeutic purposes. Science’s vaunted self-correcting mechanism, wherein other scientists try to replicate experiments and, if they fail, strike the findings from the record, did not work in this case. Dr. Hwang’s low success rate with human eggs meant that a complete failure by another group could have been written off as inferior technique, poor egg quality or just bad luck.
Dr. Hwang’s first human therapeutic cloning paper could have joined the ranks of numerous other prominent stem cell claims that other scientists cannot replicate but also cannot disprove. Groundbreaking scientific claims await broad acceptance or rejection. Some never leave that state of limbo.
The Hwang Woo-suk saga is illustrative of the serious deficiencies in the self-regulation of science. His fraud was uncovered because of brave Korean television reporters. Even those efforts might not have been enough, had Dr. Hwang’s team not been so sloppy in its fraud. The team’s papers included fabricated data and pairs of images that on close comparison clearly indicated duplicity.
Yet as a cautionary tale about the price of fraud, it is, unfortunately, a mixed bag. He lost his academic standing, and he was convicted of bioethical violations and embezzlement, but he never ended up serving jail time. Although his efforts at cloning human embryos, ended in failure and fraud, they provided him the opportunities and resources he needed to take on projects, such as dog cloning, that were beyond the reach of other labs. The fame he earned in academia proved an asset in a business world where there’s no such thing as bad press.
Fraudulent scientists and technological fake-it-til-you-make-it scammers like the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who just started a jail term for defrauding investors with spurious claims about blood testing technology, make for intriguing headlines. Seeing such crimes discovered and prosecuted, it is comforting to think that scientific truth inevitably emerges and scientific frauds will be caught and punished.
But that is not always the case, and Dr. Hwang’s scandal suggests something different. Researchers don’t always have the resources or motivation to replicate others’ experiments. Even if they try to replicate and fail, it is the institution where the scientist works that has the right and responsibility to investigate possible fraud. Research institutes and universities, facing the prospect of an embarrassing scandal, might not do so.
The job of surfacing the fraud has all too often fallen to journalists, a new class of recreational fraud-monitoring sleuths or even the occasional profit-driven short seller who wants to ensure that a hyped claim collapses. Their sporadic efforts do not add up to a reliable mechanism. In Dr. Hwang’s case, not only did the sloppy fraud and egregious bioethical transgressions get past the bioethical and scientific vetting mechanisms, evidence journalists worked hard to get was very nearly buried.
Rather than a comforting tale about justice being served, this scandal suggests that science’s sentinel systems are limited in their ability to catch misconduct — and that there are likely to be many more fraudsters out there that we don’t know about.
David Cyranoski (@Cyranoski) was the Asia-Pacific correspondent for the science journal Nature from 2000-2021, where he frequently covered episodes of scientific fraud. Currently he researches the history of science and the impact of science on society at Kyoto University’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Biology. He lives in Kyoto.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | How a Scientific Fraud Reinvented Himself
Opinion | How a Scientific Fraud Reinvented Himself
Science is known for rigorous self-policing by the research community, yet it can feel like scientific fraud is rampant. Why do fraudsters think they can get away with it?
The story of Hwang Woo-suk, a South Korean scientist who gained notoriety for claiming to clone human embryos, provides clues. After leaving the field in disgrace, Dr. Hwang has landed in clover, and now spends his days cloning beauty show and racing camels for United Arab Emirates royalty.
Dr. Hwang’s story is re-entering the public eye nearly 20 years after his fall from grace with two new documentaries, on Netflix and YouTube. His improbable career should prompt reassessment of popular assumptions about the effectiveness of science’s supposed self-correcting system, and recognition of the ways in which it can fail to deter or discipline misconduct.
Dr. Hwang burst into the spotlight in 2004 when he reported success in making an embryonic human clone and deriving stem cells from it. This was the proof-of-principle for the once-hyped “therapeutic cloning” — in which patients’ own cells, from the skin or other tissue, could be used to create embryonic stem cells with their genetic signature, which could then be used to treat diseases.
The distance to the clinic shrank with Dr. Hwang’s 2005 follow-up study. The team claimed to have made embryonic stem cells from nine patients using a much more efficient protocol than the previous report. The apparent breakthrough won Dr. Hwang widespread acclaim. South Korea named him a “supreme scientist” and released a postage stamp to celebrate his achievement.
But all was not well in the clone factory, as Dr. Hwang’s lab at Seoul National University had come to be known. As a journalist covering his ascendance for Nature, I was the first to report ethical breaches involving the team’s sourcing of human eggs.
Eggs are a critical part of cloning, and Dr. Hwang’s prodigious supply, which he claimed were from unpaid volunteers, was what set him apart from other scientists. But during an interview, a graduate student in his lab told me that she and another student donated their own eggs to the research program.
Investigations after Hwang’s downfall revealed that the other student had performed the cloning attempts herself. “Though it was I who started it, I’m scared,” she wrote to a friend just before the procedure. “General anesthesia, self-cloning (it’s inconceivable? cloning using my own eggs? how tough I am).” She added, “I shouldn’t have done it this way, not giving up until the end, not standing up to the professor. I will work harder to forgive myself.” Other eggs were bought, which went against ethical guidelines.
Dr. Hwang denied wrongdoing. But months after his 2005 report, a courageous Korean news team provided evidence that stretched from unethical egg procurement to fraud. The journalists persevered despite threats, withdrawal of sponsors and finally cancellation of the program.
By the following year, both of Dr. Hwang’s once-heralded papers were retracted, the cloning factory was shut down and Dr. Hwang was indicted on a charge of fraud, violation of the country’s bioethics law and embezzlement. “This gentleman’s career and probably his life is ruined,” David Scadden, a doctor and acclaimed stem cell researcher at Harvard, told an American news program.
But a seemingly less important breakthrough by Dr. Hwang’s team, reported just before the human cloning story unraveled, held the keys to his future: the first cloning of a dog. Various other species, from sheep to mice, had been cloned, but domestic species such as cats and dogs had proven a challenge. With the largess bestowed on the Supreme Scientist, Dr. Hwang’s colleagues had succeeded, after more than 1,000 attempts, to bring a cloned Afghan hound puppy named Snuppy into the world.
In 2006, while investigations into the human stem cell cloning scandal were still underway, Dr. Hwang founded Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, a private dog-cloning enterprise, with financial support from his die-hard fans in industry. Its clientele included police K-9 units and bereaved pet owners. Business was good.
Over the next decade, Dr. Hwang’s name was associated with a string of animal cloning efforts, from various barnyard animals for ramped-up livestock breeding, to the genetic rescue of nearly extinct species like the Ethiopian wolf, to implausible attempts to bring actually extinct species such as the woolly mammoth back from the evolutionary graveyard.
Most of these projects seem to have fizzled. But they did return an air of authority to Dr. Hwang’s name.
In 2010, a beloved champion show camel in Abu Dhabi, named Mabrokan, suddenly died. Researchers in Dubai had reported the first cloned camel the previous year, and veterinarians in Abu Dhabi had the foresight to cryopreserve some testicular tissue and skin in the hope that they could find some cloning help.
In 2021, a group led by Dr. Hwang produced 11 clones of Mabrokan. The doctor now heads a state-of-the-art cloning laboratory in the desert around Abu Dhabi and lives in a villa on the grounds of a seven-star hotel where he takes daily swims.
There was another possible ending to this story — one in which Dr. Hwang’s fraudulent research was never retracted, he kept his academic post and he was remembered as the first to clone humans for therapeutic purposes. Science’s vaunted self-correcting mechanism, wherein other scientists try to replicate experiments and, if they fail, strike the findings from the record, did not work in this case. Dr. Hwang’s low success rate with human eggs meant that a complete failure by another group could have been written off as inferior technique, poor egg quality or just bad luck.
Dr. Hwang’s first human therapeutic cloning paper could have joined the ranks of numerous other prominent stem cell claims that other scientists cannot replicate but also cannot disprove. Groundbreaking scientific claims await broad acceptance or rejection. Some never leave that state of limbo.
The Hwang Woo-suk saga is illustrative of the serious deficiencies in the self-regulation of science. His fraud was uncovered because of brave Korean television reporters. Even those efforts might not have been enough, had Dr. Hwang’s team not been so sloppy in its fraud. The team’s papers included fabricated data and pairs of images that on close comparison clearly indicated duplicity.
Yet as a cautionary tale about the price of fraud, it is, unfortunately, a mixed bag. He lost his academic standing, and he was convicted of bioethical violations and embezzlement, but he never ended up serving jail time. Although his efforts at cloning human embryos, ended in failure and fraud, they provided him the opportunities and resources he needed to take on projects, such as dog cloning, that were beyond the reach of other labs. The fame he earned in academia proved an asset in a business world where there’s no such thing as bad press.
Fraudulent scientists and technological fake-it-til-you-make-it scammers like the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who just started a jail term for defrauding investors with spurious claims about blood testing technology, make for intriguing headlines. Seeing such crimes discovered and prosecuted, it is comforting to think that scientific truth inevitably emerges and scientific frauds will be caught and punished.
But that is not always the case, and Dr. Hwang’s scandal suggests something different. Researchers don’t always have the resources or motivation to replicate others’ experiments. Even if they try to replicate and fail, it is the institution where the scientist works that has the right and responsibility to investigate possible fraud. Research institutes and universities, facing the prospect of an embarrassing scandal, might not do so.
The job of surfacing the fraud has all too often fallen to journalists, a new class of recreational fraud-monitoring sleuths or even the occasional profit-driven short seller who wants to ensure that a hyped claim collapses. Their sporadic efforts do not add up to a reliable mechanism. In Dr. Hwang’s case, not only did the sloppy fraud and egregious bioethical transgressions get past the bioethical and scientific vetting mechanisms, evidence journalists worked hard to get was very nearly buried.
Rather than a comforting tale about justice being served, this scandal suggests that science’s sentinel systems are limited in their ability to catch misconduct — and that there are likely to be many more fraudsters out there that we don’t know about.
David Cyranoski (@Cyranoski) was the Asia-Pacific correspondent for the science journal Nature from 2000-2021, where he frequently covered episodes of scientific fraud. Currently he researches the history of science and the impact of science on society at Kyoto University’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Biology. He lives in Kyoto.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article