Cloning Spin Cycle 101

According to a panel of South Korean researchers, Hwang Woo-Suk used more than 2000 human eggs and was never able to create a human embryo thru cloning even though his government provided his lab with $65 million. Evidence indicates that Snuppy the cloned dog is actually a cloned dog.

Notice how the NY Times spins this story. It's outrageous.

With Dr. Hwang's professional implosion, the goal of cloning human cells is once again open. Dr. George Daley, of Harvard Medical School, said there was no reason to suppose human cells could not be cloned, despite Dr. Hwang's failure to do so even with rich financing and copious supplies of human eggs.

"The goal of cloning human cells" or the goal of cloning human embryos and then extracting their cells? How was human cloning closed when Hwang was supposedly successful? Back then, it was a great success and it supposedly showed that this kind of experiment could work and we should push forward. Now that the research is a complete and utter failure and fraud, it still becomes a great opportunity to push forward. Amazing, isn't it?

The article previously claims (thru Stanford's Irving Weismann) that human cloning efforts have been slowed by Hwang's success. Hmmm... that's odd because the end of the article notes how numerous researchers, including Dolly's creator Ian Wilmut are pursuing human cloning. Ian Wilmut even wanted to work on human cloning with Hwang.

Gerald Schatten who failed at cloning monkey for years said, "We could have been struggling for decades," Schatten said. "Now our work is taking off fabulously. I think the whole world owes the Republic of Korea a debt of gratitude."

Here's an article from Slate in October that talks about why South Korea was beating the U.S. in stem cell research.

Here's another one from the Associated Press claiming that South Korea "takes the lead in stem cell research" because of their government's support. The article quotes Zach Hall, interim president of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine as saying this on cloning, "This is work we need to be doing here. We are falling behind."

Here's Art Caplan and David Magnus telling us that researchers in the U.S. would be smart to leave the U.S. so they could get support from other countries who look more favorably on human cloning.

I couldn't find a single time where Hwang's fraudulent success in human cloning was seen as something that was holding up U.S. researchers before the research was determined a fraud. Instead, it was continually used as a reason to entice more public funding and support for human cloning efforts in the U.S.

Those in favor of human cloning and embryonic stem cell research never fail to spin the false hope of their work even though they continuously fail to produce anything near treating a human being.

HT: Wesley Smith