December 20, 2005
DID HE EVER EVEN MEET JOSHUA SON OF NONE?:
Photos cast new doubt on cloning: Questions envelop S. Korean team (Gareth Cook, December 20, 2005, Boston Globe)
A landmark 2004 paper in which South Korean scientists claimed to have cloned human stem cells for the first time contains photos that appeared in an unrelated paper, calling their claim into question and increasing the controversy that surrounds the team.Two photos in the 2004 paper, published to great fanfare in the journal Science, claim to show batches of the world's first cloned human embryonic stem cells. Yet the same photos appear in the journal Molecules and Cells, in a research article by another Korean team, submitted before the Science paper, and in that paper both photos are labeled as cells created without cloning.
Without fraud there'd be no such thing as scientific breakthroughs.
I suppose we should be thankful Korean scientists aren't expert in Photoshop manipulations.
Posted by: John at December 20, 2005 9:50 AMI don't get the Joshua reference.
Posted by: Matt Cohen at December 20, 2005 10:09 AMIn the Old Testament, Joshua is usually referred to as "Joshua, Son of Nun". Pretty clever title for this story, I think.
Posted by: John Barrett Jr. at December 20, 2005 10:29 AMThe actual title, "Joshua, Son of None", is from a 1970s sci-fi novel about cloning JFK.
Posted by: bplus at December 20, 2005 10:31 AMNone of this Really Matters. The paper was hailed as proof that we should forge ahead with embryonic stem cell research. The fact that it was a fraud doesn't change the fact that we should forge ahead with embryonic stem cell research. One might suspect that actual scientific justification is secondary to some other agenda. If one wished to be labelled as an extremist enemy of science, of course.
Posted by: b at December 20, 2005 11:34 AMHow long do frauds last nowadays?
Posted by: Joseph Hertzlinger at December 21, 2005 11:03 PM