Hwang Woo Suk is not drowning
Mammoth is being cloned like a dog
A cheating scientist has received a patent for stem cells
Pavel Kotlyar, Nadezhda Markina, <url>The discredited famous Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk received a patent in the United States, which caused dissatisfaction among biologists.
Today he is busy cloning dogs and dreams of reviving a Siberian mammoth.
The American media and the scientific community once again had to recall the name of one of the most scandalous falsifiers of our time – South Korean biologist Hwang Woo Suk. Ten years ago, he became famous for announcing the creation of the world's first cloned human stem cells and the cloning of a dog. However, it later turned out that Hwang had manipulated the results of experiments, the stem cells were a photomontage, and he put the money allocated for research in his pocket.
When the deception was revealed, all his articles, including in the journals Science and Nature, were withdrawn, the "pioneer" was stripped of his professorship, and for fraud with private donations and public funds he was sentenced to two years in prison (conditionally), although many at home still consider him innocently slandered.
However, the other day, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued Hwang a certificate for obtaining stem cells by the very method he was convicted of falsifying. Permission to extract stem cells from human embryos to a scientist with a tarnished reputation caused, to put it mildly, misunderstanding among Western researchers.
"I'm shocked, what else can I say. At first I thought someone was joking, but it turned out not," the New York Times quotes Shukhrat Mitalipov, a professor at the University of Oregon, whose work on obtaining human embryonic stem cells was included by Nature and Science among the most important breakthroughs of 2013. According to Daniel Ravicher, head of the Public Patents Foundation, which disputes the issuance of certificates for dubious scientific and industrial activities, the bureau's decision showed that it is "a paid government agency that stamps solutions."
Bureau spokesman Patrick Ross disavows: "The grant of a patent does not mean recognition by the US government that everything a scientist claims is correct."
In a completely different spirit, the South Korean edition of The Korea Times presents the material, the journalist of which recalls that the American patent was the second after the Canadian one obtained by Hwang Wu Suk's team outside the homeland. "American patents may give a new impetus to Hwang, who seeks to resume his research on cloned stem cells, which have huge therapeutic potential," the author writes.
"The Bureau recognized the advanced achievements of Hwang's team, and this means something in light of the global leadership of the United States in science," Professor Hyun Sang-hwan, one of the scientist's closest colleagues from the National University of Chungbuk, echoes him.
What is the once famous professor doing today, who lost everything overnight?
Eight years after being expelled from Seoul National University, Hwang, who is now 61, has something that many scientists can envy. He heads the Sooam Research Center, a non–governmental organization that has established a powerful flow of scientific publications, with an annual budget of $4 million and a well-equipped six-story headquarters. After the world's first successful experiment in cloning a Snoopy dog, the results of Hwang's work are waiting for the owners of deceased dogs around the world and the police, who are interested in four-legged assistants trained to search for explosives and missing people.
Hwang's colleagues hope to use their knowledge to save endangered species and raise livestock. And the researcher himself dreams of returning to work on human embryonic stem cells in the future.
Over the past five years, about 200 dogs have been cloned in the center, which is prohibited from dealing with human eggs and stem cells, in the interests of private customers (the cost of one clone is $ 100 thousand) and the same amount for the police.
In addition to saving endangered animal species, an exotic goal for Hwang's colleagues is cloning a woolly mammoth. Working with scientists from Northeastern Federal University, Sooam sponsored two expeditions for mammoth remains in permafrost. About the cooperation of Russian scientists with Korean colleagues "Gazeta.Ru" told two years ago. Then the senior scientists of the Yakut Mammoth Museum, Semyon Grigoriev and Sergey Fedorov, said that most experts recognize that cloning a mammoth is unlikely, although theoretically possible.
Photograph: Sooam Biotech Research Foundation
"Cloning a woolly mammoth by the method proposed by Sooam will definitely not happen," says Love Dahlen, a paleogeneticist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. "Even in the best preserved samples, the genome of the cell nucleus is divided into 50 million fragments, and there is simply no way to preserve it when transplanted into an elephant egg," he believes.
Now the Koreans intend to study the Malolyakhovsky mammoth, whose remains were found last year on the Novosibirsk Islands. "In March, when the remains of this mammoth are brought to Yakutsk, we plan to hold a seminar in which foreign scientists, including Korean ones, will take part. We are working, but the results have not been received yet, this is a matter of many years. Last year's find surpasses the findings of previous years in terms of the quality of biomaterial," he told the newspaper.Ru" Grigory Savvinov, Director of the Institute of Applied Ecology of the North.
As for stem cells, it seems that the scandals in this area have not ended with Dr. Hwang.
On January 29, the scientific world was blown up by two sensational articles published in Nature. Haruko Obokata (RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology) and her colleagues from Japan and the USA (Harvard Medical School) presented a simple and cheap way to obtain stem cells from specialized cells. To do this, they only kept the blood cells of a mouse embryo in an acidic environment for some time, without any genetic manipulation. The resulting cells, which the authors called STAP, had all the properties of embryonic stem cells.
A heated discussion began. A week later, an anonymous blogger posted a message on the PubPeer website, a forum for discussing scientific publications, which raised questions that needed to be answered in order for the results of the article to be recognized in the scientific world. Can the results be replicated in other laboratories? Can this be done with human cells? Will it work on the cells of an adult body? What is the molecular mechanism of transformation? Do these cells carry an increased frequency of mutations and epigenetic disorders? Do they have the possibility of degeneration into cancer cells?
Then the same blogger drew attention to some inconsistencies in the drawings for the article. He writes that in the drawing depicting the products of the PCR reaction on electrophoresis, one column is mounted from two, and two drawings obtained in independent experiments are suspiciously similar to each other and, apparently, the same picture was used in different places.
In response to a request from ScienceInsider, representatives of RIKEN wrote that they are aware of the blog on PubPeer and they are launching testing of the results of work with the participation of independent experts from other scientific institutions on February 13. Japanese biologists also note that problems with drawings do not mean that the results are unreliable.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru19.02.2014