Bioethics Blog Weighs Hwang Damage

In our earlier item on the implications of Hwang affair, we should have included the comments from the Editors Blog of the American Journal of Bioethics, which has spent a fair amount of time on the issue.

In a posting from today (Friday) on the site, blog.bioethics.net, they wrote:

"So what will happen as the story becomes a huge huge media story tomorrow is anyone's guess. The key questions though seem likely to involve a billion versions of: 'Will ethical lapses in this lab damage stem cell research elsewhere?'
Answer: yup. And no amount of late-in-the-day standards creation will change that. People are going to ask whether the mechanisms whereby stem cell money is doled out have to be made much more rigorous. And yet again, the U.S. government will be zero help, since our rule for how to fund stem cell research is based on the altogether stupid idea that some tiny collection of embryonic stem cells in Wisconsin are ok in terms of ethics and money, but anything made after August 9, 2001 is evil and not to be funded."