Holy Cow: South Korean Government May Be Implicated in Hwang Scandal

USA Today is reporting that the South Korean Government may have known Hwang’s science was fraudulent but boosted it anyway. Here’s another aspect of the cloning controversy in a nutshell; the stampede effect to get government boosting this research with bountiful grants of the public’s funds to the point that hysteria, rather than the actual state of the science, seems to become the primary factor in decision making.

And here’s a key quote that implicates the media’s continued malpractice in fully reporting the story and its desire in the midst of this fiasco to still tout cloning as the primary hope for sick patients: “Richard Arvedon of Hartford, Conn., says his 8-year-old daughter, Emma, has had type 1 diabetes since she was 13 months old. She actually met Hwang at a United Nations conference on stem cell research several years ago.

“The family hoped that his research would help provide the breakthroughs that might one day cure Emma.

“Since 1999, Arvedon has volunteered with the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research to help foster U.S. stem cell research. He says he’s disheartened by the news from South Korea, but adds, ‘We know we have all these reputable scientists, all these wonderful people, working on this. We knew somebody’s going to do it. Maybe Hwang hasn’t, but we know somebody’s going to.’”

See, here’s the thing: At that point the reporter could have written that Type 1 diabetes has been cured in mice using adult stem cells from the spleen and that the experiment is approved for human trials. But the media still can’t—or won’t— see the forest for the trees.