A grain of truth behind the stem cell fraud of Woo Suk Hwang By Nicholas Wade The world of stem cell research was set reeling two years ago when its most successful practitioner, the Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang, was found to have fabricated much of his work. His claim to have derived the first embryonic stem cells from the adult cells of a patient was discredited after parts of his research were found to have been faked. A team of Boston scientists has now re-examined stocks of Hwang's purported embryonic stem cells and arrived at a surprising conclusion: Hwang did achieve a scientific first, though it was quite different from the one he claimed. Hwang's cells were the product of parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, meaning that they were derived from an unfertilized egg, a team led by Kitai Kim and George Daley of Childrens Hospital Boston reports in an article published Thursday in the journal Cell Stem Cell. Embryonic stem cells derived this way could not develop normally, so they would be free of ethical objections. The cells could perhaps help treat women capable of supplying eggs, should effective treatments ever be developed. Other researchers have since developed embryonic stem cells from parthenogenetic eggs. "It could have been a seminal finding if they hadn't had their blinders on," said Kent Vrana, an expert on parthenogenesis at Penn State University. Hwang soared to prominence after asserting in a report in Science in 2004 that he had developed embryonic stem cells from a patient, the first hurdle in rebuilding patients' tissues with their own cells. He said he had removed the nucleus from an unfertilized human egg and inserted a new nucleus from the adult cell of the patient. The egg developed into an embryo, from which his team claimed to have developed embryonic stem cells. The editors of Science, the journal that published his claim, later retracted the article because supporting data was found to have been faked by the Korean committee that investigated his work.