Woah. This is pretty explosive stuff.:
You heard it here first (maybe?) in English.
HWANG WOO SUK’S ARTICLE IN SCIENCE MAGAZINE, it turns out, WAS ALL BASED ON FALSIFIED DATA.
That’s been rumored, even suspected a little, but now it’s pretty much official and surely will be by morning.
South Korea has long had a need to have a national win a another Nobel Prize (note correction below), and Hwang was seen as a strong contender. Plus, as this photo from Oranckay’s second post on the latest in the Hwang scandal demonstrates, his stem cell research was a massive source of national pride. Having the country’s most lauded scientist and scientific program exposed as a fraudster is not something that will be taken lightly.:
Marmot is keeping close watch, now on the ninth update to the roundup.
(CORRECTION: As Kushibo notes in the comments, Korea’s president Kim Dae-Jung did indeed win a Nobel in 2000 (and it only cost around half a billion dollars). AP did remember this shortly after sending this post but was prevented from posting an earlier correction due to the extended outage of TypePad.)
Technorati Tags: asia, hwang woo suk, korea, northeast asia, stem cells
December 17th, 2005 at 11:33 am
“South Korea has long had a need to have a national win a Nobel Prize, and Hwang was seen as a strong contender.”
South Korea had long desired to have a ROK national win the Nobel Prize, but that desire was fulfilled in 2000 when then President Kim Daejung won the Nobel Peace Prize “for his work for democracy and human rights in South Korea and in East Asia in general, and for peace and reconciliation with North Korea in particular.”
There are certainly hopes for further Nobel Prize wins, but South Korea already has one, the centerpiece Nobel in fact, so the goal now is just to produce scholars, scientists, and/or writers to achieve more.
Dr. Hwang would have been a great candidate if his work had turned out to be real AND had yielded some of the potential promises it holds.
But even if that Nobel were to come, it probably wouldn’t have been before 2020. One of my professors at UCI was one of two UCI professors who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995, Sherwood Rowland, but he and fellow UCI professor Mario Molina had discovered that in 1974, over two decades earlier!
Except for the Nobel Peace Prize, these things are deliberately slow, precisely to prevent fiascos like this.