A Korean Soap Opera: The fall of Dr. Hwang(Part I )

I'm at home in Korea for the winter break. Currently the country is in great chaos due to one man, Dr. Hwang. Since we're both stem cell scientists I just wanted to share with all of you what is going on.

WARNING!! This story is very long so stop reading now if you are in a hurry!!

The story is still developing as we speak and there's going to be another press conference soon. I'll tell you my full thoughts at a later time on why the whole thing happened.

some background information:
The dirt on Dr. Hwang in Korea is a combination of an absurd government scandal and a Korean soap opera. Dr. Woosuk Hwang got his PHD from Seoul National University as a vetinarian and went to do a post doct. in Japan I believe at Hokaido University but I forgot the name of the exact institution.  He then became a professor in vetinary medicine at Seould National University sometime in the late 80s.

1999 - Dr. Hwang debuts:
He first became famous for cloning the first cow in Korea in 1999. According to the Korean newspapers he was the fourth guy to clone a cow in the world. Interstingly, as the facts go he never published those results. All that is cleas is that the media got a phone call from his lab one day saying he cloned a cow. So the reporter showed up with his camera and took a video of Dr. Hwang pulling a calf out of a cow. No DNA tests were ever done to confirm the matching DNA of the mother and calf. But the media turned him into a celebrity for the day. Dr. Hwang sent the president of Korea a letter asking for him to name the calf on behalf of the Korean people. Again the media aired this story of patriotism. Interestingly, when the media did an investigation this year 2005, asking for data proving that those two cows were twins he answered that the mother was now dead and that all the DNA samples and documentation pertaining to this experiment had be lost when he moved his lab. Quite fishy but lets continue.So with this feat he first caught the public's eye.

2004- Dr. Hwang clones the first human embryonic stem cells:
A few years passed without any news from his lab and then in 2004 he published his first landmark paper in Science showing data that he and his lab had cloned the first human embryonic stem cells using 272 eggs using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). This was when Dr. Hwang became a national celebrity and the media started saying how South Korea was on its way to becoming a pioneer in stem cell technology. It was at this point Dr. Hwang was able to suddenly bring in an enormous amount of government funding. I saw on the news in Korea that they just released the DNA for the samples of the cloned embryonic stem cells did not match. In fact out of the 6 samples two of the cells had XY chromosomes when the nucleus's which were transfered in should have been XX since they were using donated female somatic cells. So its a possibly his 2004 paper will be retracted soon also.

2005- Dr. Hwang creates custom made human ES cells and clones the world's first dog, Snuppy
In 2005 Dr. Hwang became famous world wide when he published a Science paper saying how he was able to use only 17 eggs to create and embryonic stem cell line from diseased patients (some with juvenile diabtes and some with spinal cord injury). This was sometime in May. And then a few years later Dr. Hwang's lab published in Nature how they had cloned the world's first dog. For reasons I don't understand dogs are near impossible to clone and no one has succeeded so far. The Korean media, government and the people fell in love with this guy. He was labelled as the "$33 billion (apparently thats the market for juvenile diabetes treatment via cell therapy) man who would cure the world." His popularity reached a point where the following things happened to him:

1.  The Korean government gave him a secret service attachment to function as his body guard since he was now designated a national treasure.
2.  For the first time in Korean history Seoul National Univ. created a special endowed chair for his position probably equivalent to University Professor given at Columbia.
3.  The Korean postal service made a stamp with his face on it commemorating his achievements.
4.  A flury of publishers published biographies on Korea's greatest scientist ever. There are a total of 8 children's books on the great Dr. Hwang.
5.  Several middle school textbooks on Korean history have a paragraph on his achievements.

6.  Korea Airlines gave him and his a voucher for free airfare first class for the next ten years to anywhere in the world.

7. 40000 people registered in an internet fanclub "IluvHwangwoosuk".

The list goes on forever but any ways you get the idea that this guy was an idol and thought of as the first and future nobel prize winner as a Korean scientist. And the government gave him $65 million in funding promising $20million each year for his lab.

2005- Dr. Hwang is exposed
Sometime in March a Korean TV station, MBC, got a phone call from a man identifying himself as a former lab tech in Dr. Hwang's lab saying he had evidence Dr. Hwang violated ethical practices to acquire the eggs and that the data he used for this landmark 2005 science paper was fabricated. The tv station sent a team of journalists to follow up on this story. Long story short they found a long list of evidence showing ethical violations and scientific fabrication. The story on how they found out is really complicated so i'll just list what they found.

Ethical problems:
1.  Dr. Hwang's collaborater Dr. Noh (head of a fertility clinic) acquired the 270 something eggs by paying women $1500 each.
2.  Two of the egg donors were female lab technicians that worked for Hwang.

Scientific problems
1.  The chimeric mouse test used to test pluripotency was never performed. Hwang made a phone call to a friend that directed the reference ab and got the stamp on the needed documents so it looked like he had submitted for a teratoma test.
2.  DNA fingerprinting: One of his lab techs was ordered to photoshop the graph of one photo such that two separate but nearly identical curves were produced. Unfortunately some Korean graduates student on the Biotech Reserach blog at another school (BRIC) noticed that the background noise was the same for those two curves and tipped the journalists. The journalists were able to obtain samples of the hES cells and somatic donor cells and submit to a reference lab at CUNY and two other labs in Korea. the lab at CUNY and the ones in Korea agreed that the cells did not match.
3.  Microscopy pictures that were tailored: the bloggers that were above mentioned collected all of the photos published in the supplementary material and found that they were able to generate the 11 cell line photos (total 162 photos) by take two of the photos and by distorting them in photoshop. Again this tip was sent to the journalists.
4. Interviews: of the 25 authors on the 2005 paper no one including Dr. Gerald Schatten (who is the corresponding author of that paper with Hwang) at Univ. of Pittsburgh had not seen the hES cells first hand. As far as they knew Dr. Hwang was the only one who actually saw the cells and knew where they were stored.

And then there's a bunch of political involvement which I will not get into since its really complicated. But just a quick note. The scientific advisor to the president who is a botanist is one of the 25 coauthors to the 2005 Science paper. And every big politican pledged enormous funding to this man.

So the Tv station aired a 2 hour two part documentary exposing their investigation findings. The first was the ethical problems. The first part ended in a huge fight that almost caused the TV station to lose its advertising clients but ultimately they won when Dr. Noh (the guy who acquired the eggs) admitted everything was true. and Dr. Hwang also confessed on national television he violated ethics.

But then the TV station aired the second part leading to the retraction of this paper. Seoul National Univ. and Univ. of Pittsburgh both started an investigation into this scandal and it is still going on. There are questions if the dog Snuppy is indeed a clone and if the 2004 Science paper is indeed true.  

Any ways here's the latest scoop on the man. i'm sad that he ended up being such a big liar and fraud. The only good news is that the young korean scientists were the one that exposed Hwang's decption and the bookstore finally got rid of those ridiculous biographies on him. I'll let you know what happens when Seoul National Univ. reports the results of their investigation early January. expect another monster email from me tieing up the current events. I'll post my thoughts then on why this happened and how it exposes the ugly side of korean society.

My thoughts:

This whole incident has made me really sad and embarassed as a Korean in that I share the same type of national blood with this man. In science honesty and integrity is the foundation which this discipline is built on. You can fool people but you can not ultimately fool nature. I had deep admiration for Dr Hwang's work as a future Korean doctor/scientist going into stem cell therapy and research. Part of the reason I chose to do my PHD thesis in stem cell biology was seeing a role model that showed that even a small country with only 40 years of modern development can become a pioneer and lead this world to a brighter future. Any ways, thats enough of my rambles.

To make up for all the Bush whacking I've done in the past I thought this picture for once showed him in a positive light just like any other excited tourist  visiting a new place. Its a great photo of East meeting West I personally thought.

And of course I wouldn't have posted this unless this new place was the Bulguksa temple in Kyoungju, Korea which I've been to many times. And Susan Guo has been there too.