The cloning and embryonic stem cell money fervor reminds me of the scandals when a preacher or priest is caught in sin. In the meantime, no one seems to understand that there might not have been any human cloned embryonic stem cells, and scientific credibility may never be the same.
For the last five years, we've been asked to place our hands on the radio and send in our money for the promise of a miracle cure. And now, it looks like the latest, loudest scientific missionary - the veterinarian, Wu Suk Hwang, has sinned big time.
Science is a religion for many in today's world. On the TV show Grey's Anatomy, at least one of the characters compared belief in a higher power with believing in Santa Claus and proclaimed her faith in Science and its miracles, rather than having faith in a higher Power. (Every one of the interns needs a good anti-depressant, in my opinion.)
The mascara is running over at Bioethics.com: the editors (and Arthur Caplan, who is not an editor, but acts like one)are crying over their own reputation, but stll can't post without somehow making snide remarks about Karl Rove, Leon Kass, and/or the protection of human life. Nigel Cameron, Wesley Smith and Richard Doerflinger have been sought out for quotes by the NYTimes, since they might have been right all along about the hype attached to embryonic stem cells.
Then, we get the daily "I have sinned!!! (but not that bad)" chest beatings by Hwang, et. al., and front row seats to schisms and heresy and flat out lies about cloned human embryonic stem cells:
The event that led to Dr. Hwang's downfall, after a month of sniping at certain puzzling aspects of his published work, was the posting of a pair of duplicate photos on two Korean Web sites.
One of the new duplicate photos appears in the June Science article about the 11 patients and a second in the Oct. 19 issue of a lesser-known journal, The Biology of Reproduction, where it was reported as being of a different kind of cell.
In the Science article, the cell colony was labeled as being the fifth of Dr. Hwang's human embryonic cell lines derived from a patient's cells, but in the Biology of Reproduction article it was designated as an ordinary embryonic cell line generated in the MizMedi hospital in Korea, presumably from surplus embryos created in a fertility clinic.
Critics cited the duplication as confirming suspicions that Dr. Hwang had never successfully cloned any adult human cell and that his Science photos might instead show just human embryonic cell lines derived in the usual way from fertility clinic embryos.
Dr. Roh's statements make that now seem exactly what happened.
Dr. Roh, the superintendent of MizMedi, was asked by The New York Times on Wednesday to say which type of cell was represented in the photos. Dr. Roh was the senior author of the article in Biology of Reproduction, which Dr. Hwang did not sign. Dr. Roh replied by e-mail that the photo had come from a large computer file of stem cell colonies and that a colleague had accidentally chosen one of the patient-derived colonies to illustrate the Biology of Reproduction article.
Dr. Roh had heard about the error just two hours earlier, he wrote in his e-mail message, and had already written to the editor of the journal requesting that the article be withdrawn immediately. "I really apologize again to have made a big mistake as a principal investigator," he wrote.
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