Big Science

It was in the context of feverish hope and hype that Korean biochemist Hwang Woo-Suk announced in 2004 that he had successfully created a human embryonic stem cell from an adult cell by somatic nuclear transfer—injection into a human egg. Hwang was a famous workaholic, spending eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, in the lab. Hwang’s exciting report was published in March 2005 in Science magazine. Researchers from around the world flocked to Korea. Human stem cell treatment seemed suddenly on the verge of reality. Hwang was a hero in Korea, and appointed to head a new World Stem Cell Hub, financed by the Korean government.

But in November 2005, an American collaborator in Pittsburgh announced that he was ending his association with Hwang. And then one of Hwang’s co-workers revealed that Hwang had obtained eggs illegally, from women who worked in his lab.

By December 2005, Seoul National University announced that Hwang’s cell lines were a fabrication, as were his papers in Science. Science retracted the papers. Hwang now faces criminal charges. There the matter stands.

PERILS OF “MEDIA HYPE”

“What lessons can be drawn from this?” asked Professor McKeown. “First, in a media-saturated world, persistent hype lends unwarranted credulity to the wildest claims. For years the media have touted stem cell research as the coming miracle. So when somebody announced that the miracle had arrived, he was believed. Does that imply there is a danger in media hype? You bet. Because not only does it raise cruel hopes among the ill, it affects scientists, too. They start to believe the miracle is around the corner—even though they should know better.

“What can we do about media hype? It would stop in a week, if scientific institutions wanted that. They don’t. They love the hype. They know it brings grants. So that won’t change. Yale, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins promote hype just as much as Exxon or Ford. So do individual researchers at those institutions. And increasingly, researchers and universities are all commercially motivated, just like corporations. So whenever you hear a scientist claim that his statements have been exaggerated, or taken out of context, just ask him if he has written a letter of protest to the editor. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he hasn’t.

“Next lesson: Peer review. All of Hwang’s papers in Science were peer-reviewed. If we ever needed evidence that peer review is an empty ritual, this episode provides it. Hwang made extraordinary claims. He did not provide extraordinary evidence. Many studies have shown that peer review does not improve the quality of scientific papers. Scientists themselves know it doesn’t work. Yet the public still regards it as a sign of quality, and says, ‘This paper was peer-reviewed,’ or ‘This paper was not peer-reviewed,’ as if that meant something. It doesn’t.

“Next, the journals themselves. Where was the firm hand of the editor of Science ? Remember that the journal Science is a big enterprise—115 people work on that magazine. Yet gross fraud, including photographs altered with Adobe Photoshop, were not detected. And Photoshop is widely known as a major tool of scientific fraud. Yet the magazine had no way to detect it.

“Not that Science is unique in being fooled. Fraudulent research has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, where authors withheld critical information about Vioxx heart attacks; in the Lancet, where a report about drugs and oral cancer was entirely fabricated—in that one, 250 people in the patient database had the same birth date! That might have been a clue. Medical fraud is more than a scandal, it’s a public health threat. Yet it continues.”

THE COST OF FRAUD

“The cost of such fraud is enormous,” McKeown said, “estimated at thirty billion dollars annually, probably three times that. Fraud in science is not rare, and it’s not limited to fringe players. The most respected researchers and institutions have been caught with faked data. Even Francis Collins, the head of NIH’s Human Genome Project, was listed as co-author on five faked papers that had to be withdrawn.