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medpundit |
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Thursday, December 15, 2005Hwang has admitted that some of the photographs of the 11 stem cell lines which appeared on the on-line version of his article were actually duplicates. This was shrugged off by Science as a minor editing error. But now Pressian has published a transcript of a suppressed interview with a former associate of Hwang, Kim Sun-jong, who told MBC that Hwang had told him to duplicate photographs of cell clusters. There may have been only two stem cell lines, and the other nine may have been duplicates. According to the Joon Ang Daily, a group of scientists at SNU feel that much of Hwang's data appears unreasonable, particularly the DNA fingerprinting used to match DNA samples. In an appeal to the SNU president to open an inquiry, they wrote: 'We are extremely worried that, by keeping silent, we are endangering the international credibility of the Korean scientific community, which in turn will cause irreversible damage to our country.' What people tend to forget among all the hullaboo about science of the future - be it cloning or "anti-aging" - is that the researchers who are presenting all of this promise also play the role of CEO. Their fortunes are at stake, so they put the most positive spin possible on their findings. And sometimes, with fame and funding on the line, they're tempted to put a little more than spin into their results and cross the line into fraud. The media would do well to turn as skeptical an eye on scientific researchers and their claims as they do on politicians and CEO's of Fortune 500 companies. posted by Sydney on 12/15/2005 08:47:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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