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HYEONI KIM believed. He had been paralysed at just 8 years old when he was hit by a car on his way home from school. So when South Korea's science superstar, Woo Suk Hwang, asked if his team could take skin cells from Kim and use them to obtain stem cells that might one day provide a cure, Kim and his family were delighted. When Hwang visited him in hospital in April 2003, the boy, then 9, asked him if he would walk again. "I promise," Hwang replied.
That promise became immortalised in a Korean postage stamp showing a man rising from his wheelchair. But it was always highly questionable. Even if Hwang had managed to derive cloned embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from the skin cells of Kim and 10 others - as he claimed in May 2005 - he would still have been a long way from mending Kim's spinal cord. Cloning merely provides ESCs that will not be rejected by a patient's immune system. Whether cells derived from them could ever fix a spinal injury, especially an old...