Winnick's "Misadventures in Cloning"

Winnick states: Why [Schatten] hadn't conducted a "careful evaluation" of the research before the paper was published remains unclear. Nonetheless, Schatten has been portrayed by the media and a nervous University of Pittsburgh as a mere adviser to Hwang, one who, when he learned of the fabrication, promptly exposed it. Schatten
himself declines to speak to the press while a university investigation is
underway.

Winnick notes: [Schatten] began his collaboration with Hwang
in late 2003, when, during a tour of the South Korean lab, Hwang told him that
his team had created a human clone. Hwang persuaded Schatten to sign on to the
2005 paper.

Winnick asserts: After Hwang's 2004 article was published, an unnamed "stem cell
expert" told United Press International, "I've checked now with four or five [stem
cell scientists], and no one believes the results." Researchers demanded a
"verification study"--a repeat of the experiment--but Hwang refused.
Some Korean scientists were equally uneasy. "Many of us didn't trust him," a
biologist at the Korea Advanced Institute told the New York Times recently. Many
posted questions on their websites, only to find themselves rebuked by Hwang's
adoring South Korean public.

Schatten went to Stanford: Last year, for the first time, Schatten took his high-level seminar on stem cells to Stanford, in the wake of Proposition 71, the measure by which California voters allocated $3 billion for human embryonic stem cell
research. Schatten told the Sacramento Bee in June, "I wanted to run a course at
a place where people would be sitting on the edges of their seats, knowing that
they had a constitutional right to do the most exciting medical research out
there."

The title of the seminar was "Frontiers in Human Embryonic Stem
Cells." As Schatten told the Bee, "When we say 'frontiers,' we mean all of the
frontiers: scientific and medical frontiers, also the religious frontier, the
legal frontier, the financial frontier and the career frontier and the
political frontier. You can just go on and on."

Schatten's present predicament is not his first brush with
professional embarrassment. While he was a researcher at the University of Wisconsin
in 1994, a fertility clinic at the University of California, Irvine, supplied
him with human eggs that had been illegally extracted without the women's
consent. An investigation by the University of Wisconsin determined that Schatten
had been provided fraudulent documents certifying the provenance of the eggs,
and he was cleared of any wrongdoing.