I Was Suspicious Months Ago

A few months ago, I wrote (about the alleged cloning results from a lab in South Korea):

If most of these overhyped results come from just one lab in South Korea, have they been replicated?

More recently, others have become suspicious:

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 13, 2005 (AP Online delivered by Newstex) -- The validity of Hwang Woo-suk's pioneering human cloning work in South Korea is in question as a former collaborator tries to distance himself from the groundbreaking research.

University of Pittsburgh researcher Gerald Schatten has demanded that the journal Science remove him as the senior author of the highly publicized report published in June that detailed how individual stem cell colonies were created for 11 patients through cloning.

………

Now, Jaenisch and a significant number of leading stem cell researchers are calling on Hwang to submit his cloning research to independent analysts to bolster public confidence, which they perceive as eroding because of the continued controversy over Hwang's work.

Schatten set off the ethics furor last month when he publicly accused Hwang of collecting eggs from subordinate scientists, a practice many consider unethical, and lying about it to him.

But until now, even Schatten has maintained that the main findings of the paper _ that tailor-made stem cells were extracted from embryos cloned from the DNA of sick volunteers _ were valid.

One type of sleaze leads to another.