Another Cloning
"Breakthrough"
The
World’s First Phony Stem Cells
By Wesley J. Smith
human
cloning, published in the prestigious peer--reviewed journal Science,
was tempered by the inefficiency of the process: It took 242 human eggs to
get just one embryonic stem cell line.
That problem seemed solved when,
last May, Hwang published another article in Science asserting that
he had again successfully cloned human embryos, this time deriving 11 stem
cell lines and, moreover, reporting an astounding 10--fold increase in egg--use
efficiency. Cloning proponents were giddy, declaring that the age of therapeutic
cloning was nigh. Soon, they predicted, sick patients would be able to clone
embryos made of their own tissue, from which, in turn, genetically matched
stem cells could be derived for use in regenerative medical treatments. Hwang’s paper was greeted joyously by cloning
advocates and their media allies in the United States for another reason:
The research had been done in South Korea. Hwang’s “breakthrough” therefore
proved that the United States was “falling behind” in stem cell research.
Hence, they argued, President Bush’s policy limiting federal funding of embryonic
stem cell research to lines created before August 9, 2001, must be overturned
to permit American research to flourish. Meanwhile,
Hwang was lauded internationally as a genius and embraced by his countrymen
as a national hero. The South Korean government created a postage stamp in
his honor, depicting a figure leaping out of a wheelchair. (Never mind that
such therapeutic benefits remained hypothetical; never mind that an unjustly
neglected South Korean colleague had already restored partial mobility and
feeling to a paralyzed woman using umbilical cord blood stem cells that require
no cloning and no sacrificed embryos.) Hwang looked like a Nobel laureate
in waiting. Then the roof caved in.
In mid--November, Hwang’s American research partner, Gerald Schatten of the
University of Pittsburgh, severed ties with him, complaining that the South
Korean had purchased the human eggs used in his experiments-in violation of
ethical canons requiring that they be donated-and lied about it. Then came
word that some of the photographs depicting the stem cell lines that had accompanied
Hwang’s 2005 paper were duplicates, not originals. But this didn’t seem too
serious. Science claimed it was a production error.
Shortly after that, however, came
rumors, followed by open accusations, that Hwang had committed research fraud.
A junior researcher said that rather than Science being to blame for
publishing the wrong photos, Hwang had actually forced him to submit duplicates
to make it appear that his experiments had succeeded beyond their actual merit.
Another of Hwang’s colleagues claimed that the second experiment had required
hundreds more eggs than reported. If true, it would mean that the egg efficiency
problem with human therapeutic cloning remains unsolved.
But this was all a prelude to the
real drama: On December 15, Roh Sung Il, one of Hwang’s 2005 Science
coauthors, charged that 9 of their 11 stem cell lines were faked, and that
the remaining two lines might not exist at all. South Korean scientists, academics,
and media clamored for independent verification of all of Hwang’s work. At
first, Hwang’s lab stonewalled. Then Hwang held a press conference, and matters
became even more confused.
His responses were chaotic, his story
continually evolving. He denied faking the research. But he also acknowledged
that only three of the embryonic stem cell lines had passed a necessary test
to prove their viability. Then, sounding like Captain Queeg, he claimed that
he was the victim of a nefarious plot in which someone, somehow, had switched
his cloned stem cell lines with embryonic stem cells derived from in vitro
fertilization embryos. Finally, he asserted some of the stem cell lines had
been destroyed by fungi, but that he was thawing five frozen samples to prove
he had actually created cloned embryos and derived stem cells from them.
Last Friday, however, all pretense
of innocence was dropped, when an investigatory panel from Hwang’s university
declared that at least 9 of the 11 stem cell lines were faked. (The other
two are still under investigation.) The ruse apparently involved splitting
an original cell sample into different test tubes and then claiming one cell
line was from the patient and one from a clone. In this way, Hwang somehow
convinced one of the world’s most prestigious journals-and through it, the
world-that he was a historic figure in science. Hwang resigned his university
post in disgrace.
Hwang’s implosion leaves the field
of human cloning research in a state of meltdown. Their poster boy is at best
a liar, at worst a fraud and a charlatan who never created human clones at
all.
This debacle raises several interesting
questions: What does it tell us about the thoroughness of the peer review
process? Why were younger South Korean scientists able to discover Hwang’s
missteps when the presumably more seasoned peer reviewers for Science
failed? Will the American media take a cue from their 
courageous
counterparts in South Korea, who pursued this story until it cracked, and
finally bring skepticism to their coverage of biotechnology? More to the point,
will the adult/umbilical cord blood stem cell successes that have emerged
one after the other in recent years finally receive the attention they deserve
in the mainstream press, which has been so intoxicated with embryonic research
as virtually to ignore non-embryonic breakthroughs? Don’t count on it. The pro--cloning political forces, and their media
allies, recognize the potential of the Hwang fiasco to damage their cause,
so they have quickly regrouped and begun to furiously spin the story. The
same voices that not long ago railed against President Bush’s stem cell funding
policies for supposedly allowing America to fall behind the cutting--edge
research in South Korea, now indignantly blame Bush for creating a hyper--competitive
atmosphere that led to Hwang’s failures. “Ethics can get forgotten as other
nations and private companies race to fill the void left by the president’s
reluctance to fund stem cell research,” wrote bioethicists Arthur Caplan and
Glenn McGee in the Albany Times Union. “Only a properly funded U.S.
stem cell research program will guarantee oversight and the protection of
all involved.”
That might possibly be true if scientific
fraud were the only ethical problem associated with the human cloning agenda.
But it isn’t. Indeed, the bioethicists should ponder how science’s core values
of integrity and objectivity are being corroded by the passionate political
pursuit of a legal license to clone.
For years, human cloning has been
promoted through propaganda techniques of misrepresentation, exaggeration,
and false hope for the suffering. Take the profoundly deceptive $35 million
political campaign that last year convinced California voters to pass Proposition
71, authorizing the state to borrow $3 billion to subsidize research into
somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning and embryonic stem cells. In order to
induce wary voters to endorse billions more in debt despite the red ink flowing
catastrophically out of California’s coffers, proponents promised that the
state would one day garner a bounteous return from royalty and tax payments,
perhaps eventually recouping all the money borrowed to fund the initial research.
(Voters should have asked themselves why, if this were true, the state’s numerous
venture capitalists hadn’t been clever enough to fork over the $3 billion.)
Thus Robert Klein, the driving force
behind the initiative and now head of the California Institute for Regenerative
Medicine, assured voters that universities and private firms receiving grants
would share $1 billion or more in royalties with the state. But, as reported
by the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere after the election, it
now appears that little, if any, royalty money will ever be returned to the
state. “What Klein knew before the election was that such royalty--sharing
by the state might be hampered by federal regulations, according to an attorney
who helped Klein draft the initiative,” the Chronicle reported. “Yet
he didn’t tell voters.”
That wasn’t all. When opponents of
Proposition 71 asserted in the official ballot arguments that the initiative
would subsidize human cloning, the pro--71 campaign sued to prevent the argument
from being mentioned in the state’s voter election guide-even though the initiative
explicitly created a state constitutional right to conduct human somatic cell
nuclear transfer, the scientific name for a human cloning technique. (The
judge saw right through the ruse, and ruled that human cloning was at the
heart of the initiative.)
Then there is the ongoing hype about
the medical potential of cloning, which reached cruel heights in the wake
of President Reagan’s death from Alzheimer’s disease. Using the widespread
public mourning for Reagan as a backdrop, human cloning advocates argued that
Alzheimer’s could be cured if only the impediments to federally funded embryonic
stem cell research were pushed out of the way.
In fact, though, Alzheimer’s disease
is extremely unlikely to be effectively treated with stem cells, whether
cloned or natural. As Washington Post science reporter Rick Weiss allowed
in a June 10, 2004, article, “the infrequently voiced reality, stem cell experts
confess, is that, of all the diseases that may someday be cured by embryonic
stem cell treatments, Alzheimer’s is among the least likely to benefit.” This
is because Alzheimer’s is a whole brain disease that “involves the loss of
huge numbers and varieties of the brain’s 100 billion nerve cells-and countless
connections, or synapses, among them.”
If stem cells have little “practical
potential to treat Alzheimer’s,” why do proponents of cloned--embryo research
continue to invoke a cure for Alzheimer’s in their sales pitches? Weiss quoted
Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological
Disorders and Stroke: “To start with, people need a fairy tale. Maybe that’s
unfair, but they need a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.”
So where are we in the cloning debate?
At this point, we don’t know whether human cloning has been successfully accomplished
or not. We don’t know whether embryonic stem cells have been derived from
cloned embryos. We don’t know to what depths the dishonesty of the seemingly
most successful researcher in the field actually descended.
We do know that cloning proponents
in this country are avid in their desire for billions in federal and state
money to pay for morally problematic and highly speculative research that
the private sector generally shuns. And we do know that some advocates
of this public policy agenda are more than willing to play fast and loose
with the facts in order to get their way. In short, the human cloning agenda
is falling into public disrepute-and for that, proponents of the agenda have
no one to blame but themselves.
