la truffa di Snuppy

[behrajan]

da Lancet

Writing a new ending for a story of scientific fraud

He was once hailed as a research pioneer, a credit to his country—South Korea, which treated him as a hero—and as Scientific American's Research Leader of the Year for 2005. But now the career of Hwang Woo Suk has been moved on to the marginalia of history, where he joins a small but infamous group of scientists who have committed fraud.

In 2004, Hwang published a paper in Science, which reported the successful cloning, using 242 donor eggs, of a human embryo, from which he was able to derive stem cells. The next year, in Nature, Hwang announced the creation of Snuppy, an Afghan hound, the first cloned dog. But it was a May, 2005, Science report that catapulted him into the spotlight. In that paper, Hwang described the cloning, using only 185 eggs, of 11 separate stem-cell lines from the DNA of patients, an achievement thought to be the first step towards customised, genetically matched repair of injured tissues.

The first sign of trouble emerged when it was uncovered that, contrary to Hwang's previous assertions, as many as 1100 eggs may have been used for the 2005 paper. Furthermore, some of those used in the earlier paper came from research staff who worked in Hwang's laboratory (an ethical lapse) and some from paid donors (currently illegal in South Korea).

More revelations quickly followed. On Dec 29, a Seoul National University panel announced that Hwang could produce no data to support the findings reported in the May, 2005, paper. The same day, Science reported that it was “moving toward retractionâ€