Yikes

Two winters ago our first 6-hour exam for Ponzy/Chem452 was heavily cloning-centric due to the report, published in Science, of the first cloned human blastocyst through a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer. It was amazing, awe-inspiring stuff; the horizon of biomedical therapeutic cloning seemed that much closer. The exam was interesting, almost fun. It was an exciting and proud time to be a scientist, to understand what the report was claiming, and the theory and techniques behind it all.

In November, when the first reports of unethical practice surfaced (out of Pittsburgh --a sidenote--), I had no idea that it would all come to this. It's all over every news source, on the front page of the Science Times: the findings in the original paper were fabricated. Since 2004, other labs have done what Woo Suk Hwang and his team claimed to have done, so it's not like the actual theory has taken a step back. But there's been a huge, tragic loss in all of this. I feel it personally as a mixture of disgust at the behavior of Woo, shame to be even minor member of a disgraced research community, disappointment in the revelation of a false hero, and sadness in knowing that science has lost credibility in the eyes of the public.