Stem cell scandal: shockwaves hit UK

Nuala Moran

Much of the upset focuses on the blow to patients who believed immune-matched cell lines would soon be a reality. Scientists who visited Hwang in his laboratory feel personally duped. Others expressed puzzlement that having achieved the significant breakthrough of producing blastocysts through cell nuclear replacement, Hwang felt compelled to stage an elaborate fraud. All are concerned that there could be repercussions for their research.

"There is huge disappointment amongst the community of patients who believed Hwang’s work would soon lead to patient-specific stem cell therapy," said Chris Shaw, a neurologist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, who was planning to work with Hwang on motor neuron disease.

"The collaboration with Hwang has been cancelled before it started. While this news is a tragedy and a setback we believe the goal of nuclear reprogramming is achievable and important."

Erstwhile admirer Stephen Minger of King's College London visited Hwang in his laboratory, and has spoken previously of how impressed he was by what he saw there. "All of us who admired Hwang are deeply saddened by this revelation. However, it is likely to have a minimal effect on stem cell biology per se, and work in the field will continue. It is also important to remember that cloning and stem cells are different things, and that stem cell lines have been, and continue to made without using nuclear transfer."

'It beggars belief'

This was a much less sophisticated fraud than the Piltdown man hoax of 1912/1913, said Malcolm Alison, of the Institute of Cell and Molecular Science, Queen Mary University of London. "News from South Korea that Hwang, or somebody in his team, fabricated the data to claim they were able to therapeutically clone embryonic stem cells from normal skin cells donated by eleven patients beggars belief."

"DNA analysis these days is so routine that this fraud ranks almost as a schoolboy prank."

"It is a major blow that human therapeutic cloning now looks to be much more of a challenge than [Hwang's] recent reports led us to believe," said Alison Murdoch, professor of reproductive medicine at Newcastle University. Like Hwang, her group has also produced a blastocyst through cell nuclear transfer. However, they did not manage to generate any stem cell lines from it, and believed Hwang's success was down to a better a source of donated eggs.

"We believe therapeutic cloning promises important scientific development which could lead to future treatments for a range of diseases. We are committed to continuing our research in this area as part of a broad portfolio of research into stem cell therapeutics."

"Stem cell researchers have always expected this work to be difficult, and we predicted it would be many years before we were in a position to produce therapies derived from therapeutic cloning which could be used to treat patients."

The Hwang debacle highlights also that embryonic stem cell research must be tightly regulated for both scientific and ethical reasons. "We, like others in the UK working in this area, are quite rightly subject to what are probably the tightest controls in the world," said Murdoch.

Keep it open and accountable

Harry Moore of the Centre for Stem Cell Biology at Sheffield University agrees. "To avoid scientific fraud, research has to be conducted in a way that is as open and accountable as possible. The UK has an excellent record in the area of embryonic stem cell research and its governance and has more experience in this area than any other country."

"The [six] embryonic cell lines generated in our own centre have been submitted to the UK Stem Cell Bank and are freely available to any other research group in the world to use in their investigations. I'm confident that major medical therapies will arise from stem cell research. Many cell lines have been produce without cloning."

While the news from South Korea was disappointing it in no way diminishes the potential of stem cell technology, believes Simon Best, Chairman of the BioIndustry Association and chairman of the reproductive health company Ardana. "The news does reinforce the UK's leadership in all aspects of this important work. This is something we should be proud of and continue to support strongly."

The impact on South Korean science will be very much greater than any impact on stem cell research worldwide, and future therapies, said Anne McLaren, of the Gurdon Institute at Cambridge University. "Meantime corneal damage is being repaired by eye stem cells, and clinical trials are in progress to assess the effect of bone marrow stem cells on heart disease."

"Human embryonic stem cell lines are being derived from embryos generously donated by patients in IVF clinics, in this country and elsewhere, and research is proceeding slowly but steadily, following encouraging findings in animal models."