Friday, August 3

A fraud who didn't need to lie

Woo Suk Hwang, the South Korean who went from national scientific hero to disgrace, is now well known as a fraud.

But it now appears he may have unknowingly made a scientific breakthrough - and one that is more important than those he claimed to have achieved.

A team largely based in Boston/Cambridge MA led by George Daley (Children's Hospital Boston /Harvard) have looked closely at his data and found that, indeed, he did not create stem cells by somatic cell nuclear transfer (i.e. cloning)

The distinct genetic fingerprint of the stem cells produced suggests they may be the first in the world to be extracted from embryos produced by parthenogenesis ("virgin birth")

Reports all over the media, including at Nature, the BBC and the NY Times.

The paper itself is in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

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