Korean scientist tainted by stem cell scandal might have made inadvertant discovery

Korean scientist tainted by stem cell scandal might have made inadvertant discovery
The notorious stem cell research scandal by Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk could in fact be an exciting new discovery, according to a report published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

Hwang Woo was in the centre of a scandal two years ago, when he falsely claimed that he had managed to create cloned human embryos by placing the nucleus of the created embryo in a human egg. He also said that he had extracted stem cells from the cloned embryos.

However it was later revealed that Hwang Woo had in fact committed a serious ethical breach by using eggs from his female researchers and the stem cells were not from the cloned embryos. Hwang Woo's fall from a respected researcher and a national hero in his country to being treated like a criminal who was charged with fraud and embezzlement was widely reported in the media.

But a group of American researchers found that Hwang Woo had found out a way to create embryos using the parthenogenesis method. In this method, eggs are converted into embryos even if they are not in contact with the sperm.

Dr George Daley, of the Stem Cell Program at Children's Hospital Boston, said that the research team was so excited in declaring that they had created cloned embryos, they completely overlooked the fact that they had managed to create a human embryo through the parthenogenesis method.

"Unfortunately at the time they published their work they did not know what they had done so they had mistakenly isolated these parthenogenic embryonic stem cells, and yet misrepresented them as true clones. In fact they had produced the world's first patient-specific embryonic stem cell, and that is very valuable", he said.

Professor Azim Surani, from the University of Cambridge, revealed that Hwang Woo's mistake could in fact prove to be more valuable than his false claim of creating cloned embryos. Though scientists agree that this would be a major advance in embryonic research, many revealed that the absence of a father DNA might prove to be significant during the growth of the embryo.