HWANG 'EM!

While we’re at it (Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, March, 2006)

Among those taken in was the prestigious magazine Science, with the media leading the chorus of global acclaim. It went on for months and months. Then it turned out that Hwang Woo Suk, the South Korean scientist, was forced to admit that he had faked the evidence for his cloning experiments and related discoveries. In an interview, Dr. Leon Kass of the University of Chicago, who has recently stepped down as chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics and is famous for choosing his words with care, put it this way: “Scientific fraud is always revolting, but it is fortunately rare, and, in the end, truth will out. But in this case, American scientists and the American media have been complicit in the fraud, because of their zeal in the politics of stem-cell and cloning research and their hostility to the Bush funding policy. Concerted efforts have been made these past five years to hype therapeutic cloning, including irresponsible promises of cures around the corner and ‘personalized repair kits’ for every degenerative disease.” The media and the large part of the scientific establishment were “complicit in the fraud.” So eager were they to puff the high promise of, among other things, embryonic stem cell research, so determined were they to ignore the proven rewards of employing adult stem cells, and so exultant were they in scoring points off the Bush administration, that the usual cautions were thrown to the winds in announcing a great scientific breakthrough and cruelly raising the hopes of those who suffer from sundry diseases that a cure was at hand. Kass said, “The need to support these wild claims and the desire to embarrass cloning opponents led to the accelerated publication of Dr. Hwang’s ‘findings.’...We even made him Exhibit A for the false claim that our moral scruples are causing American science to fall behind.” The technological imperative—that if something can be done, it must be done—operates by the motto Full steam ahead, and morality be damned. Of course, it is not usually put that bluntly. The denigration of moral “scruples”—the word sounds so old-maidish—is thinly veiled by the hiring of the best bioethicists that money can buy. They can be counted on to issue permission slips for whatever ambitious scientists want to do. To be sure, not all scientists are unscrupulous, but the imperative to push the envelope is built into the system. Before he went down in ignominy, Dr. Hwang was an international celebrity and the darling son of South Korea. It is reported that a postage stamp was issued in his honor. Whatever their interest in philately, every researcher involved in fields related to Hwang’s fraud should keep an enlarged copy framed in the laboratory. Others might be sent to top editors and executives of the world’s media. Especially sordid in this case was the eagerness with which Hwang’s “findings” were embraced for crassly political purposes. Such incidents should not be forgotten as yesterday’s news. “Hwanging” deserves a permanent place in our vocabulary, referring to the many instances in which dubious or fictional scientific advances are invoked in order to create a simulacrum of inevitably about the abandonment of moral reason. This instance of Hwanging was not the work of one man. It was the result of an ideologically driven scientific-media complex that, if unchecked, will continue to pit science against morality, with the likely and unhappy result of bringing science into popular disrepute. Complicity is the right word.