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It sounded too good to be true - and it was. When an unknown South Korean scientist named Hwang Woo Suk (right) claimed to have extracted stem cells from cloned human embryos, scientists around the world hailed the breakthrough as opening the way to cures for a host of diseases.
But how had this scientific who-he beaten everyone else to a potential Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough? Now we know: he made it all up. An investigation by Hwang's university has failed to find any evidence that the cloned stem cells ever existed.
The academic community is portraying Hwang as a lone bad apple swiftly extracted from the barrel of scientific knowledge - ignoring the ease with which he got into the barrel in the first place.
But the blame lies squarely with the research journals, whose standards are
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| Hwang's last paper was accepted by Science magazine barely seven weeks after submission |
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playing second fiddle to a desire to be in the media spotlight. In their haste to scoop their rivals, the editors of these journals are failing to ask questions that even a tabloid journalist would ask.
Wasn't it odd that an unknown team succeeded where all the experts had failed? The referees that vet claims may have given Hwang's claim the thumbs-up - but given that their field of research would gain from the resulting publicity, they would, wouldn't they?
Everything points to the need for caution, yet this is routinely thrown to the wind when journals sense a big exclusive. Hwang's last paper was accepted by Science barely seven weeks after submission - twice as fast as it takes to approve ho-hum research.
But, more than anything else, journal editors must start asking the question that might have saved former Mirror editor Piers Morgan over those fake pictures of Iraqi prisoner abuse: Are we in danger of wanting the claim to be true? 
FIRST POSTED JANUARY 10
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