Thanks Charles for providing science education which is sorely needed today.
Ray
----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Scouten" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, December 30, 2005 9:19 AM
Subject: Re: Stem cells


> Science is inherently self correcting.  The universe functions as it does.
> If I announce a discovery to make rocks fall up, or that I can create cold
> fusion reactions, I eventually need to publish how I did it.  Since these
> would be important findings (and why fake  a result that is not
> important?), other scientists will jump in to extend or disprove my
> findings.  They will first try to do what I did, but the rocks will not
> fall up, because that is not what rocks do. Word will get around at
> scientific meetings that nobody can replicate my results using my methods,
> and the journal that published me will be notified.  I will be
> investigated, and fired, or at least my reputation will be besmirched, and
> no results from my lab will have credibilty to anyone any more.
>
> Hwang Woo-Suk had to know this.  He clearly has mental problems, or need
> for immediate fame and gratification, or the idea that he could publish
> now and find the methods to back it up later.  Or found an error in his
> reports, and desparately kept covering up with more lies.  This happens to
> politicians too, but it is not inevitable that they will be exposed, as it
> is in science. In any case, as must happen, he was exposed.  The system
> has worked, we can look at the case and think of ways to tighten up, but
> the defense is not against someone who will fool the world forever, but
> someone who has needs or warpage enough to lie when he knows he must be
> exposed and discredited eventually.  We do not need to mess with the
> system of peer reviewed publication, or investigator guided research
> programs.  Mistakes happen, and occsionally lies are told, but they self
> correct.
>
> A commercial industry that lies about what it can do will evenutally have
> to put up or shut up.
>
> The ethical breach of using employees eggs is serious, and not necessarily
> self correcting, although it did get exposed in this case.  Had the
> science worked, he might well have gotten away with that if no one blew a
> whistle.  Some controls and oversight on procurement, or an audit path of
> where important tissues and cell lines came from, may be in order,
> especially at the frontier and high pressure labs in science.
>
>
> Cordially,
> Charles W.  Scouten, Ph.D.
> myNeuroLab.com
> 5918 Evergreen Blvd.
> St. Louis, MO 63134
> Ph: 314 522 0300 x 342
> FAX  314 522 0377
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.myneurolab.com
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Parkinson's Information Exchange Network
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bernard Barber Ph.D.
> Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2005 3:24 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: FW: Stem cells
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Editorial: Phony cloner
>
> Why Korea stem cell fraud matters here
>
> Published 2:15 am PST Thursday, December 29, 2005
>
> Story appeared in Editorials section, Page B6
>
> Can California's $3 billion stem cell institute learn something from the
> misdeeds of South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk?
>
> It can, but only if leaders of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine
> take the time to publicly grapple with this scandal. So far, they have
> acted as if Hwang is a distant aberration whose fabrications don't affect
> them. Nothing could be further from the truth.
>
>
>  As a column on the opposite page notes, Hwang was once the world's master
> "cloner" in creating lines of embryonic stem cells. Last Friday, he
> admitted
>
> faking key parts of his research and resigned from Seoul National
> University.
> Hwang's methods first came under scrutiny when some of his colleagues
> accused him of buying human eggs from his underlings, a breach of ethical
> protocol. Now investigators are examining if Hwang broke other rules and
> faked other studies.
>
> While California's institute can do only so much to combat scientific
> fraud
> -
> the responsibility lies largely in the hands of peer-reviewed journals -
> it can set standards for obtaining eggs and other biological material, and
> ensure those rules are enforced. The institute's medical standards working
> group is
>
> now preparing such regulations. Yet at their last meeting, on Dec. 1, the
> committee's members went out of their way to avoid any discussion of
> Hwang's mounting troubles.
>
> Why is Hwang relevant? Because up until this month, he led the world's top
> lab in this field, and he supposedly had rigid standards in place. Now, as
> we have learned, Hwang created a Potemkin Village of ethical standards - a
> façade that he could display at colloquia that was as thin as a sheet of
> cardboard.
>
> How did Hwang create that façade? How was he able to exploit it? What
> institutional safeguards were missing that might have exposed Hwang's
> fraud earlier?
>
> While the answers are still murky, the California institute needs to at
> least start asking the questions - assuming it wants to avoid a similar
> scandal.
>
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