human cloning

The Hwang Meltdown

Nigel M. de S. Cameron
President & Co-founder
Institute on Biotechnology & the Human Future

It will be some time before the final significance of the South Korean cloning story can be assessed. Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk, veterinary professor and seemingly brilliant cloning researcher, has lost his star status as rapidly as he acquired it. The ancient principle of hubris and nemesis has rarely been better displayed. If reports are to be believed, side by side with the strong prospect of a Nobel prize, Korea heaped on him honors that left western scientists agog: free first-class air travel for a decade, a postage stamp, and the popular adulation we tend to reserve for rock stars and ball players. After the first wave of scandal broke -- over egg "donation" from junior researchers and paid harvestees -- hundreds of Korean women signed up on a website to offer him their eggs, including an entire class of 33 high school girls. The television program that had taken a lead in investigating his lab received death threats for its pains. To their great shame, after Hwang had initially done the "right thing" and stepped down from his global "Stem Cell Hub," the Korean government's spokesperson suggested that "western" values were being applied to Korean culture -- as inept a public relations move as could be imagined. Earlier in the fall, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) approved unanimously the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, which makes a point of stating that cultural diversity and pluralism can never be used to undermine fundamental human rights and freedoms. As biotechnology research and development moves increasingly to the "tigers" of the pacific rim and into the developing world, there can be few more timely statements of principle.

The fall-out from the Hwang scandal has spread to the major science journals, whose reviewing processes plainly missed evidence of, at best, botched work, and what many -- including some of his collaborators -- have now suggested is outright fraud. Still, its political fall-out could be huge. Whatever else really happened in his lab and his mind, Dr. Hwang and those who showered him with accolades fell victim to that same hype that drove through California's pro-cloning Prop. 71 to the chagrin of many of the politicians, editorialists, and voters who must now live with its financial and other consequences the morning after. And, as states around the country desperately put "me-too" initiatives in place (all on a far smaller scale than California), we need to pause and take a deep breath.

The debate is not, of course, about stem cell research. "Adult" stem cells, not least those culled from umbilical cord (now given a big boost by legislation just passed in Congress), have led to dozens of cures and are the subject of clinical trials around the globe. Embryonic stem cells are themselves controversial, but despite the impression many Americans have been given there is no federal law against their being used for research, and indeed research on certain cell lines is being federally funded. The Bush administration's approach is mirrored in many European countries; Germany liberalized its existing ban on all embryo-related research and turned the United States compromise into German federal law. There are at least half a dozen different ethical and policy options on the table.

The debate here is about cloning to make the embryos, so-called "therapeutic cloning," which, while it has been widely characterized in the American press as a subset of the abortion debate, is really about something very different. That is why socially liberal Canada will send "therapeutic cloners" to prison for five years and secular France, for seven.

Perhaps the Hwang debacle will help us focus afresh on research cloning as an issue that cuts to the heart of our assumptions about how science should handle human dignity. There has been a wide consensus across the political and moral spectrum that whatever view we take of the early embryo, it is not simply another laboratory artifact. That is why earlier this year the United Nations General Assembly approved by nearly 3-1 the United Nations Declaration on Human Cloning, which called on all nations to ban all forms of cloning -- partly because of its threat to women's health. South Korea, of course, voted against it.

-- Nigel M. de S. Cameron

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