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Discredited stem cell research may have merit after all
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published August 3, 2007
NEW YORK - Remember the spectacular South Korean stem cell fraud of a few years ago? A new analysis says the disgraced scientist actually did reach a long-sought scientific goal. It's just not the one he claimed. The new study suggests Hwang Woo Suk and his team produced stem cells - not through cloning as they contended - but through a different process called parthenogenesis. That, too, is an achievement scientists have long pursued. In 2004, when Hwang and his colleagues at Seoul National University announced that they had produced a human embryo through cloning and that they had recovered stem cells from it, the news made headlines around the world. Two years later their research and a later paper were declared frauds by a committee of his university. The stem cells weren't produced by cloning, the committee said, but it was highly likely that they came about through a much different process called parthenogenesis. In parthenogenesis, an unfertilized egg is stimulated to start dividing as if it had been joined by sperm. It develops for a while under the control of its own DNA. Some species, such as sharks, can reproduce that way. Human eggs can't develop long enough to make a baby. In cloning, by contrast, an egg's DNA is removed and replaced with genetic material from a person. It is then stimulated as in parthenogenesis, but it develops under the control of the donor's DNA. Scientists have long hoped to use parthenogenesis to produce stem cells. Like cloning, parthenogenesis could provide stem cells with a genetic match to a person - in this case, the woman donating the egg. The first scientific paper to report stable populations of human stem cells obtained through parthenogenesis appeared only about a month ago. In a paper published online Thursday in the journal Cell Stem Cell, an international team of scientists says Hwang and his colleagues actually accomplished the feat in the research behind their discredited 2004 paper. Hwang was fired from the Seoul university in 2006 and now heads a privately funded lab outside of town.
[Last modified August 2, 2007, 22:14:06]
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