In an interview in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal, Dr Leon Kass, the former chairman of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, expressed his scorn for the legion of Dr Hwang’s former supporters.

“Scientific fraud is always revolting, but it is fortunately rare and, in the end, truth will out. But in this case, American scientists and the American media have been complicit in the fraud, because of their zeal in the politics of stem-cell and cloning research and their hostility to the Bush funding policy. Concerted efforts have been made these past five years to hype therapeutic cloning, including irresponsible promises of cures around the corner and ‘personalised repair kits’ for every degenerative disease. The need to support these wild claims and the desire to embarrass cloning opponents led to the accelerated publication of Dr Hwang’s ‘findings’… We even made him Exhibit A for the false claim that our moral scruples are causing American science to fall behind.”

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Michael Cook

Michael Cook edits BioEdge, a bioethics newsletter, and MercatorNet, an on-line magazine whose focus is human dignity. He writes from Sydney, Australia.

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