Editorial: Don’t rush to rehabilitate Hwang
By Editorial,
Nature
| 01. 21. 2014
An article published on Nature’s website last week has created quite a buzz in South Korea. It details efforts by former Seoul National University cloning specialist Woo Suk Hwang to rehabilitate his scientific career after he was found in 2006 to have been involved in fraud. Some in South Korea are taking the article as a sign that Hwang is now producing great science and is once again lauded by the scientific community. Stock prices of companies with connections to Hwang’s work have apparently jumped. It is as if many of the people talking and writing about the article have not read it. They and others can do so now if they wish: it appears as a News Feature on page 468.
As readers will see, the article is not a show of support for Hwang’s research. Nor is it an attack. It is the story of a rare event: a scientist attempting with some success to dig himself out from the depths of ignominy. It is a journalistic exercise, not a scientific endorsement. And it was commissioned to...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 07.11.2024
Louise Perry’s recent article in The Spectator cautions against “The quiet return of eugenics,” a threat she locates in preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders. The technology is billed as a way for parents undergoing IVF to select which embryo to implant based on information about each embryo’s genetic risk factors and traits. These reports, she says, give parents “a very full picture of the adult that embryo could become”––from their child’s risk of developing different diseases to their “likely...
GATTACA was released in 1997, but — remarkably — is even more relevant now than it was then, as the technologies whose social implications it explores have developed considerably.
On Thursday, June 13, the California Film Institute presented GATTACA to a sold-out house at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center as part of their Science on Screen series. CGS Associate Director Katie Hasson offered framing for the film and participated in a Q+A discussion.
The film’s plot explicitly involves...
By Ellie Kincaid, Retraction Watch | 06.18.2024
Nature has retracted a 2002 paper from the lab of Catherine Verfaillie purporting to show a type of adult stem cell could, under certain circumstances, “contribute to most, if not all, somatic cell types.”
The retracted article, “Pluripotency of...