by CKR
It’s clear now that Woo Suk Hwang falsified his sensational claims of producing patient-specific stem cells. What I’m wondering is why he thought he could get away with it.
It’s been very hard to find useful news on the story. Science magazine provided the best reports in its 6 and 13 January issues (web version subscription only), on which I’ll base this post. If you want links, this one and this one are not bad, but they leave a lot out.
If Hwang’s team had in fact produced stem cells by inserting nuclei from patients’ cells into egg cells, the way would have been paved for rebuilding injured spinal cords and growing replacement organs (new pancreases for diabetics, or eliminating those long queues for kidneys and livers).
If you’ve taken a science course that required laboratory work, you may have noticed that “dry-labbing,” writing up results without doing the work, can be easy. That’s why unknowns are assigned in chem labs. But some experiments are quite predictable, the expected results clearly explained by the text. A bit of back-calculation gives the “measurements” without mess or fuss.
If you’ve been a teaching assistant or professor, you also know that results can be too good, measurements too predictable. You also keep an eye on who’s attending lab and who’s not.
Hwang knew what his results needed to be: viable stem cells (or the appearance thereof) as shown by standard tests. He also knew what kinds of evidence needed to be provided that he had developed such cells. More work than figuring out the dependence of a pendulum’s period on its length, but much, much less than actually doing the work. And nobody had succeeded in such experiments before, so nobody knew what looked too good.
A senior researcher can have enormous power over those working in his laboratory. Junior researchers are totally dependent on their boss for granting them authorship of scientific papers and recommending them for degrees, future jobs, their career. This is why the donation of eggs by junior researchers in Hwang’s group came under question.
The internet has opened up avenues for junior researchers who feel they’re getting a raw deal. A “tip off” mailbox on the website of a tv news program and anonymous posters at a message board of the Biological Research Information Center helped to uncover the fraud. Presumably the tipsters were junior researchers in Hwang’s group. Making such criticisms through channels can damage the accuser far more than the accused, even when the accused turns out to be guilty.
It’s hard to see why Hwang would commit this kind of fraud. Even if the researchers in his group kept quiet, other researchers would follow the instructions in the papers to do the same thing he did. They would do this to learn the technique and to figure out better ways to do it or to bend it to their purposes. This is what reproducibility means.
Perhaps Hwang thought that he was close to being able to do what he dry-labbed and just needed some time. If the instructions in the paper didn’t work for others, he could claim that they weren’t doing it right or that there were subtle differences between laboratories. Both have been true in other cases, and both have also been used an excuse by those claiming fradulent results. But the latter were found out, and Hwang would have been too, even if there hadn’t been those messages on the internet.