I've been following the Hwang Woo-Suk spectacle with fascinated disgust. I wrote about their papers a few times way back when, and I was both excited by the possibilities and upset at the way the US had abandoned all leadership in this field. Now it's all falling apart because one of the principal authors seems to have faked substantial amounts of the data, calling the whole project (and all of the affiliated investigators) into question.

It's not entirely surprising. South Korea was throwing lots of money into this research; stem cells have awesome potential, and this was clearly viewed as a source of future biomedical breakthroughs and international prestige. Big buckets of money and a government that wanted certain highly desirable results is a recipe for exploitation, and they seem to have found the man to take advantage of it all.

But I don't need to say much, since bioethics.net has an excellent summary. Here's the long-term worry:

The key questions in the public discussion of the Korean matter seem likely to involve a billion versions of: "Will ethical lapses in this lab damage stem cell research elsewhere?"

Answer: yup. And no amount of late-in-the-day standards creation will change that. People are going to ask whether the mechanisms whereby stem cell money is doled out have to be made much more rigorous. And yet again, the U.S. government will be zero help, since our rule for how to fund stem cell research is based on the altogether stupid idea that some tiny collection of embryonic stem cells in Wisconsin are ok in terms of ethics and money, but anything made after August 9, 2001 is evil and not to be funded.

The flaws run both ways. It is a bad idea to have a research program dedicated to getting a specific end result that accommodates an ideological end. In South Korea, we have science running pell-mell for lucrative and sensational advances in human stem cell research; in the US, we have ideologues running in the opposite direction, convinced that human stem cell research is evil. We have a gap in the middle where we should have a majority of the work directed at simply figuring out what's going on in a small slice of biological reality.

The case of Hwang Woo-Suk may ultimately be helpful if the message taken is that cheating at the science will be caught out, and the culprits will see their respect and reputation demolished. It's a disaster if it is interpreted to mean that their must be greater security and less openness to prevent people from being caught.

I mostly agree with bioethics.net:

There are those who hold that the key issues here involve the money, lack of regulation, conflicts of interest, and misconceptions held by donors, government and the people of Korea about what this research could do - misconceptions that led to giving one man too much lattitude. And there are those who believe that the evils of detroying embryos could only lead to such an outcome, a 'greater evil'. We've made our argument - whatever the cause and whatever the sin there is only one way for the problem to be fixed and that is US funding of stem cell research with concomitant ethical standards the world is forced to either meet or forgo the US market for its drugs and devices.

I'd like to see the US promote a rational strategy for stem cell research (although I doubt that that is possible with the current administration), but I don't think it is the only solution. There is the EU, after all. The US could spiral off into the outer darkness, and there still are other countries that could take the lead in principled research. I admit that abandoning the US to medieval backwardness isn't exactly a desirable solution, but hey, if it's what the majority wills…