It is not the first time that it has happened and, tragically, it will not be the last: A scientist who announces groundbreaking research is later unmasked as a charlatan who has faked his results. The latest perpetrator is South Korean geneticist Dr. Hwang Woo-suk. His groundbreaking stem-cell research published last year has turned out to be rigged.
Hwang’s fall into disgrace has been as rapid as his meteoric rise to international celebrity. South Koreans, who had hailed him as a hero, have taken badly the revelations of falsified research. They were intensely proud that their country had seemed to make such a dramatic contribution to scientific knowledge in a highly competitive and cutting-edge area of research. Now, for some years at least, every other South Korean scientist working on any project, however unrelated, will find their work not only harder to promote but also harder to fund.
While no one can approve of what Hwang has done — and many Koreans are currently vilifying him — he does seem to deserve some sympathy. Put bluntly his attempt to fool the scientific community was pathetic. He knew perfectly well that his research would need to be duplicated by his peers. A few failures by other laboratories could be put down to subtly different conditions, but in the end, stem cell researchers around the world would need to use his discoveries as the next step up in their own work. If that step were rotten from the word go, it would quickly collapse under the weight of other scientists. Only if he was mad enough to believe that his method and conclusions were right, and that others laboratories would be able to prove it with tests which his own people had failed to make work, could he have seriously expected to get away with his fraud.
The explanation is probably, however, more prosaic. Hwang and his team had worked long and hard and promised their sponsors results, which to their dismay they found that they could not in fact deliver. The pressure to announce some sort of success must have mounted until Hwang and his researchers agreed — and it seems certain that most of the people working with him had to have been complicit in the deception — to rig the results of tests.
The important point here is that it is not simply these scientists who have been shamed. The current climate of results-driven research is in the dock and needs to be reconsidered carefully. The pressures to be first with a discovery, especially if there is a clear commercial development that can be made from it, are distorting the whole scientific process.
No scientist wants to see years of careful and exhaustive work come to nothing. In the purest terms, no research ever fails, since proving a negative actually adds to knowledge. However those who invest big money in research too often demand headline-making discoveries. Sometimes, as the sad case of Hwang demonstrates, this attitude is self-defeating.
