Scandal ends: redeemed scientist gets credit for historic “virgin birth”
Nuclear transfer-pipette inserted into egg
When life is more dramatic than a TV soap opera, it’s newsworthy; but when it happens in the scientific community, it’s sensational.
Last week, the life drama of South Korean stem cell researcher, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang, famous for cloning the world’s first human embryonic stem cell and the world’s first dog (Snuppy), finally came to a redemptive close. Once hailed as the leading pioneer in human cloning and stem cells, he was subsequently vilified by accusations of improper procedures and falsifications of research mainly involving his students and other team members. Similar to the Greek character, Icarus, Hwang rose to glory too fast, flew too close to the sun and fell into the sea completely disgraced and ostracized. I’m sure Icarus felt better about his fate than Hwang felt midway through this ordeal.
But in the last year there have been whispers, reported here last fall, that his work was reanalyzed by multiple top tier labs and found to be legitimate. And now it’s official. Published in last week’s Cell Stem Cell, a team led by Harvard’s Dr. George Daley and including teams from Canada, England, and Japan, reported the official results of their whole-genome analysis of the DNA of Hwang’s stem cells. They verified that Hwang indeed made the historic discovery… the first human cloned cells created by parthogenesis, otherwise, known as “virgin birth.” A very difficult process to master and unlike the usual method of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), parthogenesis doesn’t require the union of egg and sperm but is initiated spontaneously from the egg alone. The international team analyzed tens of thousands of gene snippets on the cells’ genomes and compared these signatures to those of the egg donor and of the skin cell donor.
So what happened? According to Daley, this seems to be a case where the discovery was too far ahead of its time. In 2004, no one knew what a parthenogenetic cloned cell looked like, so Hwang probably didn’t realize what he had on his hands and his team’s mistake was not realizing the revolutionary aspect of their findings and trying to fit the data into an already existing definition. What he did find was something both entirely new but also legitimate. By 2006, advances in technology and research made it possible to verify the team’s data.
According to Dr. Renee Reijo Pera, Director of human embryonic stem cell research and education for the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, “[Hwang] really would have been far ahead of the rest of the field by just reporting these lines as parthenogenetic; they could have reported these legitimate results and been scientific heroes.”
Now redeemed, Hwang will continue his pioneering research in nuclear transfer and will continue to make stem cells a viable future therapy for everyone suffering from neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s to diabetes.
In the history of science, we haven’t been fair to some of our notable scientists and are often too quick to judge and condemn. Advances in research inevitably unveil our mistakes and many times, the career of a great scientist is already destroyed. It’s good to know that, unlike Icarus, there is a happy ending to this story and that Hwang’s career has been resurrected to fight for medicine another day.
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Lincoln Kim is a member of the healthcare and life sciences team of the MaRS Venture Group. He evaluates and supports the development of technology platforms and commercial market opportunities of start up and emerging companies, facilitates collaboration among research groups and between research scientists and industry.