P.C. Shannon

Nature reports:

The university committee looking into scientific misconduct in the laboratory of South Korean cloner Woo Suk Hwang announced on 10 January that his 2004 claim to have cloned a human embryo was fake. But his Afghan hound Snuppy is a real clone.

I’ve written about this research before, and now it all turns out to be fake. The greatest damage done by this scandal is the way it will affect the general’s public’s perception of science and of therapeutic cloning in particular. I still think this is an avenue that needs to be fully explored, in spite of temporary set backs.

The Nature article also discusses the number of human ova that Hwang went through in the course of his research and the ways he obtained them. Apparently, he coerced female lab members to donate. That’s bad. American standards require that egg donors receive no compensation.

The problem is that donating eggs involves surgery and the injection of large amounts of hormones, so that the woman “superovulates” and produces multiple eggs rather than the single one that she would normally produce. In fact, donating eggs (at least for money, I don’t know about research purposes) is legally in many European countries because it is considered to be quite dangerous.

I mean, it’s like they’re donating a kidney not to save some sick kid, but for research purposes. Doesn’t it seem like they should get some compensation for that?