Chicago Tribune | Stem cell advances a fraud

Reports of dramatic advances in human stem cell cloning by a South Korean scientist were declared Thursday to be fakery, setting back international hopes for quickly developing breakthrough therapies for many diseases.

The fall from grace of Hwang Woo Suk, whose research briefly made him a scientific rock star, is a discouraging development for a field of study considered the most promising in medicine.

Yet U.S. scientists interviewed Thursday said the impact of the fraud is temporary and it will not derail research into treatments based on adult and embryonic stem cells.

Moreover, despite the negative publicity the fabrication brings to a high-profile field, the fact that Hwang's colleagues ultimately detected the fraud proves science still has effective self-policing powers, they said.

"Actually the scientific process was validated," said Dr. John Kessler, a stem cell researcher at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "He was a fraud and we now recognize it, and it was his fellow scientists who blew the whistle."

In May, Hwang reported in the journal Science that he had developed 11 stem cell lines using cloned embryos built from the genetic material of adult patients. A panel of investigators at Seoul National University, where Hwang worked until he resigned last week, said Thursday that it could not be proved those cells ever existed.

The announcement dashed hopes that a shortcut had been found to treating patients' maladies with replacement tissue derived from their own genes. It was also a career-ending disgrace for Hwang and damaged the South Korean government's scientific establishment, which had been heralded as a world leader in cloning research.

But scientists in the field said it is only a matter of time before someone succeeds where Hwang failed.

"It's discouraging to see something of this sort happen, but it really shouldn't in the long run have any effect on stem cell research and stem cell biology," Kessler said. "It doesn't affect the extraordinary progress we've made in all these areas, including the study of embryonic stem cells."

University of Chicago geneticist Janet Rowley, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, said the South Korean affair could have a negative impact on stem cell research in the U.S. if critics are able to argue that scientists in the field are not following ethical standards.

"As far as we know this fraud is limited to the Korean group," she said. "It's easy for people who choose to tar people with the same brush."

But the scandal may also have an energizing effect on scientists who had thought they were trailing Korea in embryonic stem cell research, Rowley said.

"Some scientists here are going to try harder to do this cloning work because instead of being as far behind as they thought they might be, they may well be making good progress in this very difficult area of research," she said.

Research on stem cells, which can be coaxed into forming various types of body tissue, is proceeding along two lines.

Adult stem cell research, the more advanced, involves stem cells from bone marrow, muscle, heart, brain or other tissue. Bone marrow stem cells have been used for many years to treat some forms of cancer.

Researchers say embryonic stem cells have even more therapeutic potential because of their greater adaptability. Scientists hope to use the cells to repair spinal cord injuries and treat Alzheimer's disease, heart damage and many other disorders.

Such cells are acquired from fertilized eggs destined to be discarded by fertility clinics.

The advantage of therapeutic cloning is that embryonic stem cells created this way would be genetically identical to the patient's own tissue and not prone to be rejected, as are transplants from unrelated donors.

The cloning process involves placing the genetic material from a body cell, such as a skin cell, into a donated egg that has all of its own genetic material removed. As the egg begins to divide to form an embryo, stem cells can be isolated.

Some critics oppose the process on the grounds that it also could be used to create cloned humans. Others object because the cloned embryos are destroyed to extract stem cells.

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Stem cell advances a fraud