I haven’t had much to say about the South Korean cloning meltdown; I don’t think it’s really very important in the long run, though of course it was a shock, and remains a kind of horror-show as it unfolds.

What we know is, essentially, that a South Korean team headed by the now-disgraced Hwang Woo-suk galvanized the world last year by announcing that they had successfully cloned a large number of human embryos - becoming the first group in the world to do so in volume. What’s more, they had made sure to do so under close IRB supervision, imposing strict protocols for how eggs were to be harvested for the attempts, and what kinds of insulation there would be between the cloning team and the egg donors to prevent coercion. Some time after that announcement, questions were raised as to whether those guidelines had been followed, as Hwang claimed they had; discrepancies were noted between the time the team’s first results were reported and the time that would have had to pass for eggs gathered under the new protocol to produce a cloned embryo (and some of the first reported results may even have dated from before the development of the new protocol). Later, it developed that at least one of the eggs used in the reported successful clonings came from one of Dr. Hwang’s research assistants, both violating the harvesting protocol and raising important questions of coercion in Korea’s highly hierarchical and authoritarian culture and academic system. This revelation prompted one of the American co-researchers to resign from the project to avoid affiliation with unethical practices. And then, most recently, it was revealed (one agonizing step at a time) that some of the reported cloning results may not have been correct, or that some of the reported clones were not in fact real, or that almost none or in fact none of the clones had been created as described. The major paper announcing the results was withdrawn, and at least one other paper was withdrawn. Finally Dr. Hwang resigned his position, and the entire episode is now regarded as contributing no reliable science at all to the field of cloning/stem-cell research, and as being in every respect a mind-boggling fiasco. Scientifically, we are back where we started, as if the Korean episode had never happened. In the court of public opinion - especially as spun by right-wing opponents of cloning and embryonic research - things are worse than before.

OK - so much, so bad. A scientific mess of the first water, with important ethical lapses thrown in: the IRB protocol was violated; material donors were subject to possibly overt, and probably implicit, coercion; the protocol breach was lied about in print and in public; research results were falsified in journals and in public statements; the falsifications were only uncovered slowly and in the face of further prevarications. Yet it played out as all such cases of scientific dishonesty always do: although opponents of science are constantly harping on the rare cases of scientific misconduct - Piltdown Man, Haeckel’s embyos - as if they invalidate science itself, or the field of science in question (always either evolution or human sexuality), the disparagers themselves have never succeeded in actually identifying or correcting any cases of scientific misconduct. To do that, they would have to understand science, which they resolutely refuse to do. In all such cases - and The Case of the Crazy Korean Cloner is merely one more example - it is scientists themselves, and in this case ethicists, who unveil the dishonesty and set the record straight.

Ethicists, and the defenders of academic honesty, do not expect that falsifications will never occur - though we may hope so. But we know that the procedures of real science, and of careful ethical oversight, will catch almost all such cases, and most especially the ones that are important enough to matter. The inherent self-correction mechanism of science - the fact that people can and will attempt to replicate, and to falsify, one’s reports - all but guarantees that the only science that remains false is the bits that no one pays attention to in the first place. Fields of heated scientific ferment are bad places to publish prominent faked papers (something Hwang must have been a fool to overlook).

Merely wrong science - and there are incalculably many good-faith wrong turns in science, it’s how the field works - will certainly be corrected by further efforts. Dishonest science in any prominent forum will very likely be uncovered. (Dishonesty usually results from thinking you can get the results you have not yet gotten, and so claiming them anyway - but if you are wrong, you will be found out, and even if you are right you are likely to be found out. Human cloning is almost certainly possible - Hwang wasn’t wrong about that - but he claimed he had the goods when he didn’t, and then couldn’t produce them as claimed.) Research ethics does not possess such a self-correction mechanism - you can’t re-run an informed-consent procedure to prove that it works - and so vigilance rather than mere good work is the necessary corrective. But in the Hwang case the ethicists did all they could to guide the process, then raised red flags when it went off the rails. A researcher resigned what was arguably the highest-profile scientific project in the world at that moment - and while the science itself was still believed to be good - over ethical violations that themselves seemed more technical than substantive. And those ethical revelations prompted widespread criticism even from supporters of the basic research project itself - partly fueling the scrutiny that eventually brought the whole thing down.

In this case, the process worked perfectly, and with amazing speed - regarding both the ethics and the science. Right-wing opponents were incensed that the project was taking place at all - that it went badly adds nothing to their objections, nor proves them right. But the fact that these lapses were found out, publicized without hesitation, and then publicly proven, by supporters of the research, demonstrates that there is a core of solid professionalism in science, and that it works to enforce the self-imposed guidelines and principles that scientists and pro-science ethicists themselves have developed. And, as said above, the fact that the scientific lapses were discovered and publicized by scientists - specifically, scientists who supported the research, only proves again that science when it goes wrong is more reliable than the anti-science crowd pretends it to be even when it goes right.

In the end, this is a riveting, but singularly uninstructive, event. We know nothing more about cloning than we did, thanks to Hwang and his boobish debacle. But we also know nothing more about science, or about research ethics. We know that the corrective processes they both impose on the substantive matter, and ethical conduct, of scientific research are remarkably effective, and the more so in prominent and important cases, and that they are driven by the devotion to good science of the scientists and ethicists themselves. But we knew that already. We see it on every (rare) occasion that one of these incidents pops up, when it is the scientists who uncover the bad science, and the pro-science ethicists who set it back on the right track.

Whatever the right-wing noise machine may make of this incident, it provides no fodder for their beliefs, and they have contributed nothing either to our scientific knowledge or our ethical infrastructure. Science will proceed, rightly for the most part, and entirely without their contributions or insight - as it always has done.