TUESDAY, Jan. 10, 2006 (HealthDay News) -- What had once seemed a giant leap for science has turned out to be not even the smallest of steps -- for now.
Seoul National University's announcement Tuesday that all of Dr. Hwang Woo-suk's apparently groundbreaking research in human stem cells was faked closes a bitter chapter in the quest to find more and better remedies for human illnesses.
Hwang's only legitimate claim is having cloned the world's first dog, Snuppy.
For those who have pinned their professional and personal hopes on stem cells, the shocking disclosure means this area of research is headed back to square one.
"We're back to the beginning in terms of trying to achieve somatic cell nuclear transfer," said Dr. Susan Okie, a contributing editor with the New England Journal of Medicine.
Research is being reset to "where we were before, where using somatic cell nuclear transfer to derive stem cells is only a theoretical possibility," added David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethnics. "We're hopeful, but whether it's possible and how long it's going to take is something that is now a complete unknown. This really is a setback in a lot of ways."
The setback is not a death knell for the field, however, experts predicted.
"I think these kinds of experiments will succeed," said Dr. Darwin Prockop, director of the Center for Gene Therapy at Tulane University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. "They will eventually succeed, and perhaps sometime soon."
Hwang and his collaborators made headlines in June 2005 when they claimed to have created 11 disease-specific embryonic stem cell lines using very few human eggs and again when they claimed to have successfully cloned human embryonic stem cell lines. These apparent accomplishments were published in the journal Science.
Hwang's research involved a technique called somatic-cell nuclear transfer, also known as "research cloning" or "therapeutic cloning." The method involves taking a cell from an adult or child, and then using it to replace the nucleus in a donated egg. That egg is then used to create a new line of cells.
Use of this technique is seriously limited in the United States, where labs are prohibited from producing these lines using equipment or facilities paid for with government funds.
According to The New York Times, last month an investigatory panel from Seoul National University found no evidence to support Hwang's claim to have cloned cells from 11 patients. The panel has now concluded that an earlier article was also fabricated.
The announcements have had scientific journals scrambling to set the record straight.
This week, researchers contracted by Nature, which published the initial Snuppy story, verified that the dog is indeed a clone.
Science will be publishing a retraction of the two studies it published along with an editorial retraction, it announced Tuesday.
"We are doing a systematic review of the editorial history of both papers and our procedures for evaluating them, to search for ways in which we might improve those," said Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy in a video statement. "I have pointed out in the past that even unusually rigorous peer review of the kind we undertook in this case may fail to detect cases of well-constructed fraud. To support this effort, we are calling on outside experts, including members of our Board of Reviewing Editors and our Senior Editorial Board."
Many have questioned whether the type of verification recently undertaken by Nature should have been done earlier in the process.
"In hindsight, you could say 'yes, this sort of validation should be done on this kind of a scientific breakthrough,'" said Elaine Ostrander, of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who was one of the scientists commissioned by Nature. "There's not yet a really strict gold standard for a checklist for everything that ought to be in a paper like this, but, as a result of this interrogation and paper that we're writing, I think this is one of the things that will come out of it."
The particular tests conducted on behalf of the journal were inexpensive and relatively simple, Ostrander said.
Others think that focusing on the peer-review process is sidelining the real issues.
"I worry that we're learning the wrong lesson and that is to overhaul the peer-review process," Magnus said. "In the end, science and scientific publication hinges on the integrity of practitioners and the fact that it's a communal activity. It was just a matter of time before this was found out."
And it would also be a mistake to assume this was the work of one rogue scientist, Magnus added.
"What this highlights is that there were, and may even continue to be, systemic problems that made it more likely that something like this was going to happen," he said. "Having rock star scientists and creating a huge incentive system for a handful of national scientists who will get huge amounts of money, rather than fostering merit-based community of scholars who will be evaluating each other's work, is not a good idea."
The damage to the public's perception of stem cell research is likely to linger, Prokop added: "Every time you say stem cell for a while, people will think 'fraud.'"
Nevertheless, stem cell research with the potential for real breakthroughs continues. According to The New York Times, two labs at Harvard have been seeking approval for more than a year to clone human cells. Two institutions in England are moving down the same road, as are some private companies.
In a prepared statement, Dr. Irving Weissman, director of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, said his university intends to use dollars from California's Proposition 71 -- which earmarks state funds for embryonic stem cell research -- "to recruit scientists who will find ways to do nuclear transfer research, first in animal models and then with human cells."
"It's certainly disappointing that we're back to where we were," Magnus said. "But it's not a disaster."
More information
To learn more about stem cells and stem cell research, head to the International Society for Stem Cell Research.
