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Published online 21 December 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2007.400
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Disgraced cloner Woo Suk Hwang attempts a comeback
Work continues to be published under Hwang's name.
In January 2006, Woo Suk Hwang’s apparent breakthrough articles announcing the first cloned human embryonic stem cells were shown to be fabrications. It was the biggest scientific scandal in recent history, and one might have thought his scientific career was over.
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I believe in second chance………..Bill Clinton was given a chance to finish his term as a president despite his morally unacceptable acts. If Dr. Hwang regret his past for morally unacceptable acts and can come up clean in future studies……………………why not to give him the second and perhaps last chance to use his talent to advance science! He has done enormous damage to stem cell research and its pay back time for him to repair that damage! -M. S. R.
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." What Hwang did was a very serious breach of trust, and very much directly impacted the sciences involved. Therefore any future publications with his name on them very much should be subject to added scrutiny, as was noted here. I also chafe at the Clinton analogy. Having an affair and lying about it is not of the same ilk as say working to throw an election and lying about that. Note that Richard Nixon did the later and had to resign to avoid not just impeachment but also the forced removal from office that certainly would have resulted. Bill Clinton got a "second chance" because the acts that he was accused of did not justify removal from office at all. The same cannot be said for Woo Suk Hwang.
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Honesty is paramount in Science, scientific truth cannot be manipulated for personal gains. There should be one way ticket, scientific misconduct shouldn't be rewarded in anyway. By giving second chance to Hwang will send out wrong message to young researchers by setting up example that one can get away with small or big fabricated scientific communication. By allowing him will be wastage of time, money, and space. This will prevent right people to lead the team. There are many talented brains that are doing and can do remarkable research related to stem cells. He isn’t indispensable for unraveling the mystery behind the stem cell biology.
I have to question the wisdom of providing so much coverage to this person in Nature. Even in science, it appears, any publicity is good publicity. Making a celebrity of him does the community a disservice.
Disgraced scientists pose less harm to society than over-decorated ones----------------- Let disgraced Hwang do his experiments to prove his ideas and let other over-decorated to repeat their experiments to disapprove their much hyped claims. Shi V. Liu--------SVL@logibio.com
Learning lesson from Hwang's scandal and paying attention to the other side of iPS cells ------------------------------------- A paper entitled <Can Yamanaka explain his contradictory statements?> was rejected by Nature due to space limitation. It is now published in Logical Biology. It can be found free in two formats: //PDF (http://im1.biz/albums/userpics/10001/LB2008V8N1A3_Yamanaka.pdf) //HTM (http://im1.biz/albums/userpics/10001/LB2008V8N1A3_Yamanaka.htm) // In addition, more articles on iPS cells and cloning can be found at http://im1.biz/Cloning.htm ---------------- Shi V. Liu (SVL@logibio.com)