Saturday, December 24, 2005

Korean stem cell debacle

Continuing on from yesterdays post on the Korean stem cell disaster involving Hwang Woo-Suk, it does appear that things can in fact get worse:
In the case of the 9 cell lines for which evidence was lacking, DNA fingerprint tests purportedly matching the lines to specific patients were found to be worthless. DNA tests are now being carried out under the remit of the university investigation to see whether the two remaining cell lines are in fact cloned from specific patients, as claimed in the paper. The committee says these results should be back in a few days.
So now there aren't even five surviving lines it turns out there are two and they aren't even sure if they are clones. The aftermath of all of this is going to be equivalent of a nuclear explosion, especially when the South Korean government begins asking "where did our 65 million dollars go".