The Stem Cell Hope, page 25
But it still wasn’t clear whether that simply represented a conscious decision to streamline the data presented in the paper or whether it was a hint of scientific obfuscation. Taking a stab in the dark, one of the advisers wondered whether the stem cell lines had simply been generated from IVF embryos, and not through the difficult process of somatic cell nuclear transfer, as Hwang had claimed. To prove that, however, the conspiracy theorists needed to get their hands on both the stem cell lines and the DNA of the donor from which they had been derived.
They put in a request for DNA data from fifteen stem cell lines created at MizMedi Hospital, which had provided Hwang with the eggs from some of the IVF embryos they maintained once couples had donated them for research. Through some subterfuge, the scientists managed to convince one of the members from Hwang’s team who was assisting the investigation to sneak out a sample of one of the stem cell lines described in the 2005 paper. When they sent a sample of those cells to a lab for testing, they learned that its DNA matched that of one of the fifteen lines from MizMedi. That could mean either that Hwang had not created any stem cell lines using nuclear transfer, or that he had not created as many lines as he claimed.
Han was not in Seoul when he received this stunning news by e-mail on October 19. He had flown to Pittsburgh to interview Sun Jong Kim, one of Hwang’s researchers who had been “loaned” to Schatten’s lab so that Schatten could learn the cloning technique that the Koreans had perfected. Han’s timing was perfect. Armed with the test results, he resorted to one of the oldest tricks used by policemen the world over to turn a snitch. Even with the report of the DNA match, Han still couldn’t be sure that Hwang had actually misrepresented his work. But he told Kim otherwise, convincing him that he already had enough evidence to have Hwang arrested for fraud. Han also used a hidden camera to get Kim’s response on film.
The tactic worked. Kim sang. He admitted that Hwang, now revered by the entire nation as a symbol of pride, integrity, and achievement, had instructed him to doctor photographs submitted to Science to make two stem cell lines appear as eleven separate ones.
Kim has never spoken publicly about his involvement with Han or about the circumstances of his confession. But according to members of Hwang’s lab, it was likely the basis of Schatten’s abrupt decision to distance himself from Hwang.
As the questions continued to build, Hwang made a brief escape. A deeply religious man who had considered himself Catholic before converting to Buddhism, Hwang, as so many Koreans do in times of crisis, retreated to a Buddhist temple.
Only Hwang knows the true purpose of his journey, and whether it was meant to restore or repent. He emerged, apparently renewed, with a handmade bracelet. A monk, he said, had given it to him as a reminder of his spiritual strength. “He told me that I should keep in mind the mercy and the true love of Buddha,” Hwang said. “He gave me the insight and wisdom that I need to overcome challenges and crises in life.”
Whether or not Hwang had any inkling of the challenges to come still isn’t clear. A week after Schatten’s break, Hwang’s chief collaborator at MizMedi, Sung Il Roh, admitted that some of the egg donors whose oocytes had made history in Hwang’s 2004 study had been paid for their services. All together, said Roh, he shelled out 1.5 million won, or fifteen hundred dollars, of his own money, to each of twenty women who agreed to provide eggs. “I did this work without consulting Dr. Hwang because I felt it would help in the search for new ways in finding cures to untreatable diseases,” Roh said.
That same evening, at eleven P.M., Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) aired the result of its collaboration with the tipster in an explosive investigative documentary on the egg donation in Hwang’s research. The producers interviewed women who claimed that they had sold their eggs to MizMedi, the hospital where Roh worked. Many of those eggs were then supplied to Hwang for his stem cell studies. Some of the women interviewed, whose names were withheld and whose faces were disguised, said they hadn’t known that their eggs would be used for stem cell research—contradicting Hwang’s assertion that the eggs had been obtained from donors who had signed IRB-approved informed consent forms and were fully aware of what they were doing.
Such apparent disregard for the ethics underpinning each scientific decision raised all sorts of red flags, and only bolstered the position of the slippery-slopers. Allowing cloning in order to obtain stem cells would only provide more opportunities to exploit and coerce people and their bodies, they warned.
Within weeks, on Thanksgiving Day in the United States, Hwang publicly admitted to lying about the fact that two of his researchers had donated eggs to the study. He maintained, however, that he had learned of the donations only after the fact, and that when the women initially expressed their desire to help the study by providing their own eggs, he had refused. But the junior members of the lab had gone to MizMedi on their own, he said, allegedly using different names to become donors. In a tearful apology, Hwang acknowledged “being too focused on scientific development,” and that he “may not have seen all the ethical issues related to [his] research.” In an act of contrition, he resigned as director of the World Stem Cell Hub.
Stunned by the news, Jung, who had worked so carefully to craft the informed consent process, reviewed his own records of the women he had interviewed, as well as those whom Hwang’s team had spoken to, who had also donated eggs. In the first six months of 2005, Jung had talked to about two dozen potential donors. Of these, he had approved only eleven or twelve. When Jung looked more carefully at the records Hwang’s lab had kept on the donors for the 2005 study, he was surprised—and disappointed—to find that the strict process he had put in place had not always been followed.
The admission was Hwang’s first acknowledgment of wrongdoing and all the leverage that some Korean scientists, frustrated over competing with Hwang for funding, needed to air their grievances. “There seemed to be a deep-seated resentment among other scientists that was squashed, kept back and repressed during the time of Hwang’s celebratory celebrity,” says Hyun. “But they are the ones that now were looking online, looking through the photos from his papers and exposing all the problems. They were combing through all of his stuff. That suggests to me that, given the funding structure in Korea of backing scientists [and not science projects], several people may have been professionally jealous, and wanted to see him fail.”
They didn’t have to wait long. While the government rushed to save its investment in the Hub by announcing that it would continue to fund Hwang’s lab with three million dollars a year, Ahn Curie flew to the United States and Japan for a ten-day damage-control trip. When she returned, she didn’t have good news.
“We cannot be optimistic at all about collaborating with overseas laboratories,” Sung Myong-hoon, an official at the Hub, told reporters at a press conference. In early December, Doug Melton and Kevin Eggan, who had asked Hwang to be the keynote speaker at an upcoming conference, made the difficult decision to retract the invitation. Eggan e-mailed Hwang, diplomatically citing the investigations that must be occupying most of his time, and politely suggesting a rescheduling of the talk. “He understood,” says Eggan.
Oddly, however, while the scientific community was backing away from Hwang, the Korean public only redoubled their support. Most saw him as a victim rather than a perpetrator, the target of jealous collaborators and manipulative colleagues. They believed Hwang’s explanation that he kept his lab members’ donations under wraps out of respect for their privacy. “In the end, I could not ignore the strong request by the researchers to protect their privacy,” he stated at the press conference.
Hwang’s supporters weren’t content to just talk up the selfless and admirable qualities of their hero. Taking advantage of the country’s highly wired social network, they took to online message boards with violent threats against producers at MBC, which had aired the original segment questioning the integrity of Hwang’s egg procurement process. When they went to the streets, staging a demonstration outside the MBC building in Seoul, eleven of the twelve sponsors of PD Notebook terminated their funding. The show was forced to shut down for several months.
In the scientific community, however, things were different. There Hwang had gone from golden boy to outcast; his decision to lie about his knowledge of the egg donations made him a pariah. If he had lied about that, researchers wondered, what else could he be hiding? Stem cell experts were particularly sensitive to any breaches in protocol that could be perceived by an already wary public as all the evidence they needed to justify the dangers of stem cell science. These scientists knew that every misstep could be potentially fatal for the field.
In Washington, D.C., the editors of Science, which had published both of Hwang’s milestone papers, were scrambling to determine if their review process had let important defects in the Korean papers slip through. Outwardly, the journal’s editor in chief defended the publication’s vetting process. “None of these allegations [by MBC] have been credible,” Donald Kennedy said. “Until a specific, scientifically based claim against Dr. Hwang’s findings is reported to us, we will not offer speculations.”
That came on December 4, 2005. At 11:29 P.M. Science editors in D.C. received an e-mail from Hwang, alerting the journal to mistakenly duplicated images in the supporting material supplied with the 2005 paper. “We made some unintentional errors by using about four pictures redundantly,” he wrote. Re-creating the paper trail of submissions and e-mail correspondence, Science editors determined that the error appeared in the final online version of the study but was not part of the initial submission from the Korean team. Prior to publication, the editors had asked Schatten, one of the authors, to provide high-resolution images to run with the paper. He did, after obtaining them from Hwang, he told the editors. Nobody noticed that the images were duplicates and did not match the picture initially submitted with the paper.
The next day, the University of Pittsburgh announced that it was conducting its own investigation of the paper, based on the mix-up with the images.
Almost immediately, Hwang entered the hospital at Seoul National University Medical Center, for exhaustion and stress. Pictures of the scientist uncharacteristically unshaven and unkempt, lying with his eyes closed on a hospital bed, flooded the Korean media outlets.
As the fifty-two-year-old remained sequestered in his sickroom, Schatten wrote a fifty-six-page letter to Science, detailing transgressions Hwang had committed that had come to his attention. Citing the violations, Schatten requested that Science remove his name from the 2005 paper, but the journal’s policy holds that no single author can retract his name on a paper after attesting to the validity of the contents at the time of submission.
Contacted by Science, Hwang and his team admitted to minor clerical errors in the 2005 report, as well as a major correction concerning the egg donors. Following Roh’s admission that he had provided eggs for the study that had been paid for, Science printed a clarification noting that some donors had received about fourteen hundred dollars for their eggs.
But the biggest shock was yet to come. On December 15, Hwang’s controversial partner and egg procurer, Roh, visited the embattled vet in the hospital. Roh emerged with the jaw-dropping news that Hwang had admitted to faking the stem cells. “I heard some things that I haven’t been aware of . . . that there are no embryonic stem cells,” said Roh.
Hwang took to the mike the following day, still maintaining his innocence.
“Our research team made patient-specific embryonic stem cells, and we have the technology to produce them,” he said, defending the work. He promised to thaw the remaining five lines and prove that they matched the skin cell donors from which they were made.
Unfortunately, Hwang was wrong. An investigation by Seoul National University officials found that the remaining cell lines matched IVF embryos, not the skin cell donors in Hwang’s 2005 study. Moreover, the 2004 cell lines could not be confirmed as originating from nuclear transfer either.
It was a shocking admission. The breakthrough on which an entire field depended was now apparently a sham. The stem cells that Hwang claimed to have nurtured from human cells, for the first time, had never really existed.
In the waning days of 2005, Hwang himself finally admitted the truth. “I feel so crushed and humiliated that I hardly have the energy to say I am sorry,” he said through tears during a news conference. He maintained, however, that the fault was not entirely his, but originated with his collaborators at MizMedi, who had deceived him into thinking they had successfully coaxed stem cell lines to grow from the embryos that Hwang’s team had created. “I one hundred percent trusted what they told me. Now I believe that they completely cheated me.”
Throughout the investigations and court cases that followed, which would stretch out for another three years as Hwang was brought to trial for falsifying his results and embezzling government funds, he insisted that his team had the skills to clone human cells in order to generate stem cell lines. To the end, he never wavered from this belief. The truth, however, is that while they may have had the skills to clone the cells, they lacked the knowledge and the experience to culture the cells and keep them alive.
That duty rested, according to Jiho Choi and Ok Jae Koo, on the shoulders of one man—Sun Jong Kim, the researcher at MizMedi who became a part of Hwang’s lab because of his supposed expertise with cell culturing. Hwang’s lab was adept at nuclear transfer, but as veterinary scientists, they were less familiar with culturing cells—keeping them alive in their pluripotent state with just the right media and growth factors.
Despite repeated attempts with hundreds of eggs, however, Kim could not get a human stem cell line to grow in culture. Then, says Koo, almost overnight the lines started to thrive. “Researchers from our lab also tried to isolate stem cells from the blastocyst,” Koo tells me during a meeting in Seoul on the day Hwang was found guilty of fraud and embezzlement and given a suspended jail term of two years. “But we all failed. With Sun Jong, every time he tried he could get stem cells.”
The key to Kim’s success, everyone thought, was in the feeder layer he was using. Feeder cells are the living carpet that coats the bottom of a petri dish and mimics the natural environment that nurtures cells to grow. For human embryonic stem cells, this feeder layer was actually made up of mouse fibroblast cells—the same ones Martin Evans and Gail Martin had each first used to grow mouse cell lines—that secreted the right combination of growth factors, enzymes, and nutrients. Every morning, Kim would bring a special concoction of feeder cells from his lab at MizMedi to seed the human stem cells extracted by Hwang’s team. “When Sun Jong prepared the feeder layer, almost every day it worked,” said Koo. “We called him the god of isolating stem cells.”
Within months, however, scientists were pointing out suspicious similarities between images published with Hwang’s 2004 paper that implied the team had not generated as many stem cells as they claimed. After investigations by the university, it became clear that Hwang’s stem cell lines had not been derived by nuclear transfer at all, but had indeed come from the more traditional source of IVF embryos—specifically, those from couples who had undergone IVF at MizMedi’s infertility clinic. Kim, Koo suspects, may have brought feeder cells already containing stem cells from the IVF embryos into Hwang’s lab and passed them off as the nuclear transfer lines.
Why the young researcher took such a risk, putting both his and Hwang’s careers in jeopardy, still isn’t clear, even years after the scandal. When I ask Koo about what may have motivated Kim, he pauses for a few minutes, then offers up his view of the expectations and the burden that his colleague must have felt to culture those stem cells. “In Korea, the professor is a very respected person. More than that, with professor Hwang, if he said something, it’s the law of our lab. It may have been very stressful for Sun Jong that he should isolate stem cells from blastocysts. Already it was taking too much money and so many people related to the project to bring oocytes from the egg donors and doing nuclear transfer. And only Sun Jong could do that work on this very big project. Usually even one professor can be very stressful for one student. . . . But in his case, there were around ten professors, and Sun Jong was the only student.”
Hwang still has not provided his version of exactly what happened in those months between 2004 and 2006, instituting a self-imposed media silence until, according to those who remain close to him, he proves himself right by repeating his experiments—for real this time. After being dismissed from his faculty position at Seoul National University in the wake of the scandal, he established a company, Suam Biotechnology Institute, to focus on animal cloning.
Despite the fraud involving the human cells, one scientific achievement still belongs to Hwang—cloning the first dog. As the allegations of scientific misconduct in his lab began to spread in late 2005, even this milestone, which was the lab’s third in two years, was tainted with suspicion. But after an independent lab confirmed that the DNA from the donor hound and the cloned puppy, named Snuppy, were identical, Hwang was credited with the success.
Still, the damage to his reputation, at least in the scientific community, had been done. Hwang can no longer work with human embryonic stem cells in Korea, although he is rumored to be partnering with foreign collaborators to repeat his human cloning studies. His appeal is still such that despite the scandal, nearly all of his lab members, with the exception of only a handful of dissenters, left with him to work at Suam. Choi was among them, and he remains fiercely loyal to Hwang. They remain in regular e-mail contact, and before leaving to study in the United States, he even asked Hwang to preside over his wedding, an expression of the esteem with which he still holds his former mentor. “He is an honest man, a diligent man,” says Choi. “He is not a cheat or a fraud; he would never do that kind of thing.”
