As a scientist, you can win a Nobel prize in three basic ways. Some discoveries fall into a researcher’s lap, unexpectedly, when they think they’re working on something else. To cite a classic example, in 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered pennicillin when a mysterious fungus killed off bacteria that he was using for influenza research. Sometimes the prize rewards a researcher who attacks a known topic but does so with a flair and persistence that singlehandedly gives the topic clarity and new life. I had the good fortune to recently see a talk by an excellent recent example of this in the person of Linda Buck, whose work on the way that our olfactory receptors (smell and pheromones) work earned her the 2004 Nobel in physiology and medicine. You could say that Max Planck and Albert Einstein had a similar effect on the then-hidebound field of Newtonian physics.
Nobel prizes reward a third, and I would say distinct type of work – the race by huge, well-funded labs to solve extremely high-profile problems. In this case everybody in science knows that the first person to reach finish line X, whether it be the first vaccine, the molecular structure of DNA or the sequence of the human genome, has a Nobel prize teed up and waiting. The pressure can be enormous, the money flows like water and the top people get used to reporters camped out on their front porch. The pressure and the profile of these contests can create an almost unbearable urge to fudge, to cut corners and to mislead the competition in people already inclined towards that sort of thing. A case in point being the amazing, meteoric rise and the meteoric flame-out of the stem-cell researcher Dr. Hwang Woo Suk. Read the story on the flip.
You can hardly find a better example of a modern-day Nobel race than the quest for therapeutic stem cell technology. These protean cells form the blank slate from which the body makes every other type of cell in our body; when we master the way that these cells grow and differentiate we will have the ability to heal tissues that won’t heal on their own such as the heart or the brain, broken spinal cords may heal and potentially we could regrow entire lost limbs. In some cases amazing therapeutic effects have come from simply injecting stem cells into damaged tissues. We only have an idea exactly how much power therapeutic stem cells will give to medicine, but an idea is enough.
It would be wonderful to simply reach into a patient and extract stem cells, but for most purposes you can’t. The types of stem cell that you find in an adult have already taken a few steps down the road of becoming bone, skin or brain, and aren’t nearly as useful as the cells found in an embryo or, to a lesser degree, the umbilical cord. Some parents have the foresight and the funds to culture and freeze their infant’s umbilical cells but you or I can’t do that. Tissue matching problems make it as difficult to donate stem cells (say, from a newborn’s umbilical) as it is to donate a heart or a liver.
Enter Dr. Hwang Woo Suk of Seoul National University (SNU). What if we could pull the nucleus out of a skin cell and swap it into a ‘pluripotent’ stem cell donated from, say, an egg or umbilical cord? You or I could have any kind of stem cell that we want, and they’d be ‘ours.’ Problems with tissue matching simply wouldn’t exist.
For a while Dr. Hwang seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut. His laboratory cut its teeth by cloning a dog, which at that time was a fairly impressive achievement. The discoveries that came next put him on a whole new level. In 2004 Hwang’s lab announced that they had made the first-ever stem cell line cloned from an adult patient. In answer to questions about the prohibitive difficulty that they faced in making the first line, Hwang’s lab followed up with a paper in 2005 describing a streamlined procedure that they used to make eleven lines of patient-specific stem cells. American scientists like myself accepted as fact that Korea had left us badly in the dust, but in fact Dr. Hwang’s flame-out had already started.
Three months after Hwang’s 2004 paper the journal Nature printed accusations (subscriber-only) that Hwang paid women to donate eggs for his project, a major breach of ethics at the time an now illegal. The questions lingered for over a year until Hwang was forced to admit in November 2005 that he had lied about his sources of human eggs. The truth was, in fact, even worse: junior researchers have recently testified that Hwang, their boss, coerced them into the painful and medically risky procedure.
Still, things got worse. Growing scrutiny of Dr. Hwang’s work revealed that key images purporting to be different cell lines turned out to be duplicates, throwing the existence of eleven separate stem cell lines into doubt, and a co-author went public with concerns that Hwang faked his data. The few hundred eggs that Hwang claimed to require for his eleven stem cell lines turned out to be more like 1,600, pretty much abnegating his reputation as a master of efficiency. Finally, in what must have seemed like a good idea at the time Hwang demanded in early December that Seoul National University do a full review of his work.
The review didn’t help Hwang. In fact, the report released today essentially buries him.
Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, the South Korean researcher who claimed to have cloned human cells, fabricated evidence for all of that research, according to a report released today by a Seoul National University panel investigating his work.
Chung Myunghee, the head of Seoul National University’s investigatory panel, spoke to reporters in Seoul about the findings.
The finding strips any possibility of legitimate achievement in human cell cloning from a researcher who had been propelled to international celebrity and whose promise to make paralyzed people walk had been engraved on a Korean postage stamp.
In his string of splashy papers, his one legitimate claim was to have cloned the dog he named Snuppy, the panel said.
A sad story. When you work on a project whose payoff practically guarantees fame and fortune, pressure and media attention can bring out the very worst. Dr. Hwang is a stigma that the dedicated people working on the next great medical breakthrough simply don’t need.
Jim Allen
“Cold fusion”, anyone?
Steve
“American scientists like myself”
Tim, I know the basic outline of John Cole’s biography, but I know little about you other than that you root for Pitt. (Of course, you know even less about me.) I’m just curious to understand the perspective you bring to the table.
Good post, by the way. I get the sense that the pressures on these top=level scientists are awfully similar to the pressures that cause top-level corporate executives to cook the books in order to keep their stock price up.
The Other Steve
Obviously here we need a reform of the scientific journal industry. They never should have published this guys work without verifying it.
[snark]
Buddy
Actually we need a return to skeptical scientific research not just aimed at ID, not ‘reform’ instead of the ‘flash bang lets get on TV now!’ crap that science is headed toward, and to some extent, has become (especially in certain fields).
I find it hard to believe that an article was published that had 11 identical photos proporting to be seperate cell colonies, but nobody even noticed that all the photos were the same shot. He was running the lecture circuit in the US describing his methods, and nobody bothered to verify. They just accepted this guy at face value because it is the ’cause de jour’ of the day, it seems and nobody had a second thought.
Skeptical? Whoops.
I don’t get this guy either, I mean, surely he knew eventually someone would figure out everything he’d said was a load of crock.
Paul L.
Fourth basic way – Prove the establishment wrong.
Inspiring Mavericks Win Nobel for Medicine
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17047-2004Aug19.html
Stem cells differ from other cells because they can divide and regenerate. Embryonic stem cells, which were first isolated in 1998, are prized by scientists for their “plasticity,” the potential to grow into many other cells or tissues. Scientists have for many years theorized that adult stem cells can regenerate only as cells of the tissue from which they are drawn.
But many of the companies working with adult stem cells are staking their efforts on a series of provocative and controversial scientific studies they claim show that adult stem cells can convert into other cell types — that cells drawn from bone marrow can grow into cardiac muscle cells, for example.
battlepanda
Does this mean that Snuppy is a fake? Say it ain’t so!
Tim F.
Steve,
As far as bio goes, I earned my BA in ecology and evolutionary biology, a MS in biological oceanography working on harmful algae and now I’m working towards a PhD in cell bio/biochemistry in Pittsburgh. I wouldn’t say that I root for Pitt except when I have to, which means against WVU and against Joe (spit) Paterno. The Steelers, on the other hand, walk on water.
Politically, I’ve worked on the campaigns of both Republicans and Democrats (I blogged about that earlier) but you’ll find me reliably on the left side of whatever classification scheme you choose to draw up. In spite of that, or these days maybe because of it, John and I see eye-to-eye about 90% or so of what goes up on the blog.
That’s exactly right. Pressures can lead to one small fudge, which forces you to make a slightly bigger fudge to cover up the small fudge, and pretty soon you’re William H. Macy in Fargo.
Walker
Not all journals are equal. I have known some journals that will skimp on the reviewing process to get a high profile article from a famous researcher. In my field of mathematics, one researcher abused this to publish a proof of a theorem that no one could understand. He though everyone was being dense, so he just shopped around until he found a journal star-struck enough to accept it.
The result later turned out to be false. These things happen.
Krista
“S-M-R-T!” :)
Shygetz
That’s just it…somebody did. The press didn’t discover this, the scientific community self-policed itself. It is slow sometimes, but it usually works.
rilkefan
Yeah, Tim‘s smurt, and smort too. Not sure about smirt, though – that’s more DougJ.
Brian
An acquaintance of mine who has lived in Korea for some 20 years and speaks the language fluently write a great piece on the HWang debacle. He provides some great insight into the sociological factors that contributed to the local deification of a total fraud.
http://oranckay.net/blog/?p=1229
tzs
I fall into the “fake it until you make it” as an explanation.
How much of the deification of “the wise elder” had a part in this as well? I remember Seymour Hersh’s analysis of the shooting down of the KAL plane–where he suggested that the other, younger co-pilots didn’t dare suggest anything was wrong to the the main pilot as they strayed into Soviet territory through a miscoding of the autopilot.
rachel
Here in Seoul, the Kyobo Insurance Building has stairs that lead down to the basement where Kyobo Bookstore is, and along these stairs there are portraits of all the Nobel Prize winners of the past. One of those portraits is blank; it is reserved for the first Korean to win the Nobel Prize.
Make of that what you will.