Spectacular fraud shakes stem cell field

No researcher in the United States is known to be actively trying to a clone a human embryo, though two teams at Harvard University have asked school officials for permission.

Doug Melton, who leads one of the Harvard cloning projects, vowed Friday that the work will continue despite the scandal.

"This sad news from Korea in no way weakens our belief in all the demonstrably valid experiments indicating that stem cell science holds the promise of eventually providing the basis of treatments and cures for numerous presently intractable chronic diseases," Melton said in an e-mail. "It simply means that we still need to take important steps we thought had already been taken."

Not biggest fraud, but perhaps most visible
Two experts in scientific misconduct called the Hwang scandal the most visible case of scientific fraud they could think of.

That's because unlike many other cases, Hwang's purported achievement drew so much public attention in the first place, said Nicholas Steneck of the University of Michigan.

"His research was front-page research, and then it was discovered that he falsified. Most of the other ones, it's that they falsified that made it front-page research," he said.

The controversy over embryonic stem cells made Hwang's claims so newsworthy, said Fred Grinnell, founder of the ethics in science and medicine program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

"This is a case where lots of people have been talking about stem cells and embryos and whether it's right to do it or not to do it, and how the U.S. is falling behind, and how there's great work going on in Korea. And all of a sudden it appears to be all fake," Grinnell said.

Both men said other fraud cases have been more extensive.

Grinnell cited the case of Eric Poehlman, once a professor at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, who made up research between 1992 and 2000 in areas including menopause, aging and hormone supplements to get millions of dollars in federal grant money.

"To me, that's the worst case of this kind that I've ever heard of" because he got away with it for so long, Grinnell said.

Similarly, Steneck noted the case of Jan Hendrik Schon, who had become a star at Bell Labs but then was fired in 2002 for falsifying data from electronics experiments. An investigatory committee concluded that he made up or altered data at least 16 times between 1998 and 2001.

In contrast, Steneck said, only one paper by Hwang has been shown to be fraudulent, at least so far.

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