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Korean animal researcher clones human stem cells—
and loses monkeys to fire.
SEOUL––“I never destroy any life during my process,”
Seoul National University stem cell research laboratory director Woo Suk
Hwang recently told New York Times correspondent James Brooke.
Woo
Suk Hwang on May 20, 2005 announced that he had become the first scientist
to successfully clone human stem cells––“a major leap,”
wrote Brooke, “toward the dream of growing replacement tissues for
conditions like spinal cord injuries, juvenile diabetes, and congenital
immune deficiencies.”
Said Woo Suk Hwang, “We use only a vacant [unfertilized] egg, with
no genetic materials” from which to form an embryo.
Trained as a veterinarian, Woo Suk Hwang, 52, was raised by a widowed
mother who supported six children as a dairy hand.
“I could communicate with cows eye to eye,” Woo Suk Hwang
told Brooke.
Woo Suk Hwang is a devout practicing Buddhist, wrote Apoorva Mandavilli
in a profile for the journal Nature Medicine.
But in conversing with Brooke, Woo Suk Hwang appeared to refer only to
never destroying any human life. His past achievements have included producing
the first cow conceived in South Korea through in vitro fertilization
in 1993; the first South Korean cloned cow in 1999; the first South Korean
cloned pigs in 2002; and the first cows genetically engineered to resist
mad cow disease, in 2003.
Most of this, perhaps all, could have been done without loss of life beyond
the embryonic stage, but Woo Suk Hwang has plans that almost certainly
involve severely injuring and eventually killing laboratory animals.
“This year,” wrote Brooke, “he hopes to use animal stem
cells to treat spinal cord injuries in rats, dogs, and possibly monkeys.
If the animal trials go well, he hopes to apply for permission in South
Korea and the U.S. to start conducting human trials in two to three years.”
Finding adequate specimens without deliberately injuring animals would
be unlikely.
But Woo Suk Hwang would have to replace 99 monkeys after an April 20 power
transformer fire at the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience & Biotechnology
in Daejeon, the only primate laboratory in South Korea.
The fire caused a two-hour electrical blackout. The 135 monkeys housed
at the lab overheated. “Power from a backup source was supplied
immediately, but the fire somehow broke the temperature control device,”
lab publicity manager Kim Yeong-gwon told the Joongang Daily.
“We found more than half of the monkeys dead,” primate research
center chief Hyun Byung-hwa said.
Three days after the fire, the Korea Times disclosed that Woo Suk Hwang
and team had “discovered ways to prevent monkeys rejecting organ
transplants from pigs, paving the way for the use of animal organs and
cells in humans,” Agence France-Presse summarized.
The Korea Times quoted a research team member as stating that they had
produced “dozens of pigs embedded with human immunity genes since
late last year.”
Hwang had intended to begin trying to transplant hearts and insulin-producing
cells from cloned miniature pigs into monkeys in June 2005, but that phase
of the work was delayed by the laboratory fire, the Korea Times reported.
Seoul National University and other South Korean labs have emerged as
world leaders in biotech not just because they have talented scientists,
but also because they can work inexpensively with minimal regulatory restraint.
Woo Suk Hwang and the 45 researchers and technicians employed in his lab
operate on a total budget of just $2 million per year, Brooke wrote.
In view of the economic promise of Woo Suk Hwang’s experiments,
the South Korean government has announced plans to increase the lab budget
by 50% and to build a six-story $25 million headquarters for stem cell
research.
A similar facility under construction by Oxford University in England
is to cost $32 million––if there are no further cost overruns
as result of a series of delays associated with anti-vivisection protests.
The work was suspended entirely throughout th latter half of 2004.
Opposition to animal use in biomedical research is not unknown in South
Korea, but the South Korean antivivisection movement is small, orderly,
and still seeking basic animal welfare regulations that have been in effect
in Britain, the U.S., and much of western Europe for decades.
Currently, South Korean government supervision of animal use is mostly
limited to maintaining biosecurity, so as to avoid spreading disease.
Several prominent South Korean biomedical researchers aligned themselves
with the dog meat industry in a November 2001 public statement, timed
to forestall the introduction of broadly applicable animal welfare legislation
that animal advocates had hoped might be introduced in response to the
threat of a boycott of the 2002 World Cup soccer tournament. The 2002
World Cup matches were divided between South Korea and Japan.
