South Korean Team's Remaining Human Stem Cell Claim Demolished
In an announcement that researchers worldwide both expected and feared, Woo Suk Hwang's last remaining claim to have advanced the promising field of human embryonic stem (ES) cells has been declared fraudulent. In a report released on 10 January, a committee at Seoul National University (SNU) found that Hwang and his colleagues fabricated data in their breakthrough 2004 Science paper reporting the first creation of a stem cell line from a cloned human blastocyst. In an interim report in late December, the committee had already determined that a second paper by the team, published in 2005, was fraudulent (Science, 6 January, p. 22).
The final report concludes that Hwang and his colleagues did successfully clone a dog, which the scientists reported in Nature in August 2005. It also said that the Hwang team made some progress toward cloning early-stage human embryos. But the 2004 publication amounts to "none other than deceiving the scientific community and the public at large," the report says. (An English summary of the report is available on the SNU Web site at www.snu.ac.kr/engsnu.)
In the two papers published in Science, Hwang and his co-workers had claimed to have accomplished three firsts. The 2004 paper reported the cloning of a human blastocyst, through a process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, and the derivation of ES cells from that cloned blastocyst; the 2005 paper reported the derivation of 11 human ES cell lines genetically matched to patients.
With both papers now thoroughly discredited, "we're back to the time prior to [Hwang's 2004] publication; there is no evidence at all that we can make [stem cells] from human embryos created through nuclear transfer," says Alan Trounson, a stem cell researcher at Monash University in Clayton, Australia. Hwang's team had also claimed phenomenal advances in efficiency in its 2005 paper, reporting that it needed fewer than 20 eggs to produce each stem cell line. Work in most other mammals suggests that it usually takes 100 to 200 eggs for one stem cell line, and many researchers say the unraveling of Hwang's work resurrects the question of whether the technique will ever be efficient enough for routine clinical application.
For more information: Science Magazine, 13 January 2006 , pp. 156 - 157.
The final report concludes that Hwang and his colleagues did successfully clone a dog, which the scientists reported in Nature in August 2005. It also said that the Hwang team made some progress toward cloning early-stage human embryos. But the 2004 publication amounts to "none other than deceiving the scientific community and the public at large," the report says. (An English summary of the report is available on the SNU Web site at www.snu.ac.kr/engsnu.)
In the two papers published in Science, Hwang and his co-workers had claimed to have accomplished three firsts. The 2004 paper reported the cloning of a human blastocyst, through a process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, and the derivation of ES cells from that cloned blastocyst; the 2005 paper reported the derivation of 11 human ES cell lines genetically matched to patients.
With both papers now thoroughly discredited, "we're back to the time prior to [Hwang's 2004] publication; there is no evidence at all that we can make [stem cells] from human embryos created through nuclear transfer," says Alan Trounson, a stem cell researcher at Monash University in Clayton, Australia. Hwang's team had also claimed phenomenal advances in efficiency in its 2005 paper, reporting that it needed fewer than 20 eggs to produce each stem cell line. Work in most other mammals suggests that it usually takes 100 to 200 eggs for one stem cell line, and many researchers say the unraveling of Hwang's work resurrects the question of whether the technique will ever be efficient enough for routine clinical application.
For more information: Science Magazine, 13 January 2006 , pp. 156 - 157.
posted by Ubiquitin at 3:49 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home