Content area
Full Text
JOE PALCA, host:
From NPR News, this is TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY, and I'm Joe Palca.
We're talking this hour about peer review and publishing amidst allegations that a South Korean researcher, Hwang Woo-suk, had fabricated at least a part of his data in what was hailed as a landmark paper. With me is Catherine DeAngelis, editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
And now we're going to turn slightly. And in addition to the scientific questions about his work, Hwang has faced some ethical criticism for the way his team got the eggs needed for his cloning experiments. OK. So why do you need eggs for cloning? Well, to make a cloned embryo, you take a woman's egg and you remove the egg's nucleus and replace it with the nucleus from a cell taken from an adult donor. And if everything works, the donor egg with the adult cell nucleus starts growing and after a few days it's possible to obtain embryonic stem cells that are a genetic match of the adult donor.
About two weeks ago it came to light that some of the eggs Hwang used for his early experiments were donated by junior researchers on his research--on his team, on his scientific team. And that raises the possibility of coercion. Because Dr. Hwang had, you know--was the leader of the lab, and the junior researchers might feel compelled to donate, and coercion is something that bioethicists generally frown upon. Other eggs, it turns out, came from women who were paid for their donations, and some people think that's inappropriate.
Joining me now to talk more about the ethics of egg donation is Laurie Zoloth, professor of medical humanities, bioethics and religion at Northwestern University. She's also the director of the Center for Bioethics, Science and Society and a board member of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. She joins us by phone from Chicago.
Thanks for being on the program, Dr. Zoloth.
Dr. LAURIE ZOLOTH (Professor, Northwestern University): Thank you very much for inviting me.
PALCA: And also we expect to be joined in a little while by Ann Kiessling, who is the founder and director of the Bedford Stem Cell Research Foundation. She's...