Opinion: Learning from stem cell stumbles

The leaders of California's ambitious stem cell research program should closely read the news of the last couple months. A scandal including fraud, lies and cover-ups has ended the careers of scientists in South Korea, including Hwang Woo-suk, one of the prominent stem cell scientists in the world.

Hwang's American collaborators are now under investigation at their own universities. One of them, Jose Cibelli, sat on the committee developing research standards for California's program. Although Cibelli has voluntarily withdrawn from his activities, he did so only last week, two months into the scandal.

It is now clear that Hwang's groundbreaking announcements of the last two years were almost entirely fabricated. What's more, he obtained thousands of eggs from women in a variety of unethical and illegal ways.

Many commentators initially downplayed the relevance of the scandal, framing it as a single rotten apple in a distant foreign barrel. But that's not the case.

The stem cell research atmospheres in South Korea and America - especially California - are quite similar. There's nothing that happened there that can't happen here.

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