It's Urgent to Firmly Establish Research Ethics

Scientists, educators, policymakers and ordinary citizens have to learn a painful but valuable lesson from the criminal case involving disgraced stem cell pioneer Hwang Woo-suk and his research team. On Monday, a Seoul court handed down a suspended two-year jail term to Hwang. Other researchers were also given suspended prison terms or ordered to pay fines for their breach of bioethics in relation to their data manipulation on embryonic stem cell experiments.

Hwang, 56, a former veterinary professor at Seoul National University, was found guilty of embezzling 830 million won ($704,000) of research funds and illegally buying human eggs. But he was cleared of fraud charges that he faked and inflated his research results to obtain 2 billion won in research funds from two local companies. The court discovered that Hwang had intentionally instructed his assistants to falsify research data published in the journal Science and other global research magazines in 2004 and 2005. But it could not punish Hwang and his team for the falsification because the prosecution didn't bring any charges in this regard against them.

It is disappointing that the prosecution has left the data manipulation, the heart of the controversy over the research team's disregard for research ethics, to the judgment of the academic community. Of course, a fact-finding mission of the university concluded in 2006 that Hwang and his assistants had manipulated test results to make bogus claims that they had succeeded in cloning human embryos and extracted stem cells from them. Hwang gained fame for such claims at home and abroad until they proved to be false.

No one can easily forget the Hwang case because it shocked not only South Koreans but also people around the world. The nation has been dealt a severe blow to its image as the world's leader in embryonic stem cell research and biotechnology. It goes without saying that Hwang has suddenly lost his glory and fame as a pioneer. The case has also touched off a heated debate over the nation's poor research ethics and bioethics. It has served as an opportunity to strengthen regulations on moral and ethical standards for research and life science.

Therefore, the lesson the nation learned from the Hwang case is that scientists, researchers and other academics should not sacrifice their scientific integrity in reckless and risky pursuit of achievement-oriented results. We must keep in mind that the end can never justify the means. There were some allegations that some policymakers and scholars had encouraged Hwang and his team to produce ``shocking breakthroughs'' in order to politically take advantage of the results. Thus, it is necessary to leave no room for politics to find its way into science and academic research.

It is time for the nation to set up far stricter ethics codes and a self-regulatory system in order to prevent recurrences of the Hwang case. Furthermore, it is also required to overcome the past mistakes as soon as possible in a move to beef up stem cell science and biotech research.