Patriot games

摘要

The twisted tale of Hwang Woo-suk, a once-feted but now-disgraced South Korean stem-cell researcher, is salutary at many levels. It shows, first, that you can't cut corners in sci-ence-at least, not in any meaningful way. The occasional dud result in a low-profile field of endeavour may escape critical scrutiny, but if you report inaccurate work in an area as controversial and important as human cloning, your slips will catch up with you pretty quickly. Second, it shows the risks to scientists of becoming celebrities. An artistic celebrity's audience may prove fickle, but ultimately it is only that artist's talent that is being judged. A scientific celebrity's success, by contrast, relies both on his talent and on nature delivering the goods to him in a timely fashion-and nature does not bend to a scientist's will, however much he or his audience may wish it might.