Irony, Korean Parthenogenic Stem-Cell Style
There are a lot of good reasons for researchers to be honest about their work, but this is a particularly ironic example of why deceit is a bad thing.
Some months ago, a team of Korean researchers headed by Woo Suk Hwang claimed to have produced the first stem cells from cloned embryos. It turned out that they were fudging their methods and results; the cells were, in fact, being extracted not from clones but from embryos engendered by fertilizing eggs extracted from female researchers. There's so much ethically wrong with all of this that it suffices to say that Hwang got what he deserved when his fraud was discovered and he was effectively drummed out of the field. Good riddance to bad rubbish; one can only imagine the damage that could have been done if Hwang had gone on to lie about future research projects, not to mention the time and resources that would have been wasted had the cloning fraud not been discovered in the first place.
But now for the ironic part; Hwang was so busy making up stories and hiding his ethical violations that he may have inadvertently overlooked a much more importantly real breakthrough. It seems that he may have been the first researcher to stimulate parthenogenesis in an unfertilized human egg, and the stem cells from such an egg would be donor-specific. Normal embryos as well as clones produced in vitro do not, by definition, genetically match either the male or female parent, but a parthenogenic embryo is an exact genetic duplicate of the egg-donor. In essence, Hwang may have discovered a way of producing perfect custom stem cells for women and missed it because he was so intent on proving his own initial hypotheses correct!
...Dr George Daley, who led the analysis, told the BBC's Science In Action programme: "Unfortunately at the time they published their work they did not know what they had done so they had mistakenly isolated these parthenogenic embryonic stem cells, and yet misrepresented them as true clones...
Professor Azim Surani, from the University of Cambridge, has carried out years of experiments to produce parthenogenetic stem cells from mice.
He said Hwang had probably inadvertently stimulated the human eggs to begin dividing while trying to produce cloned embryos.
Professor Surani said Hwang's unwitting step forward might actually prove more useful than efforts to clone human embryos, which he had claimed fraudulently...
The other consideration here is the alleged problem of destroying embryos for the purpose of extracting stem cells. I don't consider this to pose a problem myself, but a lot of people do based on ideological considerations. If it becomes possible to stimulate the production of embryonic stem cells without the necessity for fertilization on a regular basis, that should address those concerns. I don't know if it will, but it should because even those who insist that life begins at conception can't object on those grounds when no conception has even taken place. I'm being intellectually idealistic, of course. They'll come up with something else. They always do, it seems.
