The Speculist

The New York Times has another article this morning on the march of South Korean stem cell reseach. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

• Dr. Hwang's research is a major source of national pride for South Korea. It has recently issued a postage stamp that shows a needle inserting genetic material into an egg while in the background a silhouetted man rises from a wheelchair.

• Dr. Hwang argues that his research doesn't even involve embryos. He argues that since fertilization doesn't take place in this procedure no embryo is created.

Actually, I disagree. There is no fertilization, but there is an embryo. By definition cloning doesn't involve fertilization - where half the genetic material comes from the mother and half from the father. Even the old cloning practice (in use for decades) where a cow embryo is divided to make twin calves doesn't involve fertilization, but nobody argues that a new embryo wasn't created.

I support Hwang's work because it involves only undifferentiated stem cells.

• Dr. Hwang is a vet. He comes to the field with years of experience cloning pigs and cows.

• Dr. Hwang's biomedical research unit operates on a budget of only $2 million a year. That budget is being raised to $3 million a year.

• South Korea is building Dr. Hwang a new $25 million dollar research facility. The government is also going to open an international stem cell bank.

• Our brain drain is their brain gain:

  American, British, Japanese, Swedish and Spanish researchers who are hurrying to this verdant hilly campus in southern Seoul. The latest roll call of American institutions that are seeking collaborations with Dr. Hwang include Cornell, Johns Hopkins and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

• Factoid: A human egg will live for only two hours after its genetic material is removed. Part of the cloning challenge is a race against the clock to get the new genetic material into the egg.