Sunday, January 15, 2006

Hwang's two papers in Science were highly cited

By January, 2006, 204 scientific papers had cited the two bogus Hwang papers, according to the ISI Web of Knowledge. That meant that hundreds of scientists may have been barking up the wrong tree, or throwing good money after bad. Pick your cliche -- by offering a flim-flam recipe, and by diverting time, attention and money from techniques that could work, Hwang added months to the timeline for real results from stem cell research. [from the whyfiles]

The whyfiles also posted a satirical Nobel acceptance speech:

"Tonight, I want to thank the gulled and the gullible. I want to thank the journal Science, which validated my 'work', and gave me a venerable platform to rock the scientific world. I want to thank Seoul National University, and the Republic of Korea, which believed strongly enough in my work to ignore mutterings of fraud and ethical lapses from colleagues and underlings. Gullibility among people who should have known better turned me into a globe-trotting scientific celeb -- equal parts movie star and medical pioneer, all because I learned to grow tiny colonies of living hope for the halt and the lame.

"Most of all, I want to thank the patients. The elders frozen by Parkinson's Disease, the diabetics with their heart attacks and amputations, the desperate grandparents losing their minds to Alzheimer's disease, the paralyzed nine-year-old in the wheelchair. We all know the public demand for stem cells reflects the hope that these versatile cells can restore the dead tissue that cause so much misery in so many horrid diseases. Otherwise, who would have noticed in 2004, when I wrote about making stem cells from a cloned human embryo? Otherwise, who would have cared in 2005, when I described 11 colonies of stem cells, each an identical twin to a patient with spinal cord injury, diabetes or an immune disease?

"So in the name of scientific progress and health, in the name of regenerative medicine, and utterly immune to pride, greed and ambition, I humbly accept the Nobel Prize for Scientific Fraud. Thank you. Good night and good hoax!"


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