IT WAS SUPPOSED to have been chopsticks that made all the difference. When Woo Suk Hwang announced the creation of the first embryonic stem (ES) cells cloned from real patients in May, he attributed his success to skills honed at the dining table in his native South Korea.

“Small children learn from their grandparents to pick up slippery corn or rice,” he explained, “and that is excellent background for micromanipulation in the laboratory.”

A new era of bespoke genetic medicine, promising cures for paralysis and diabetes, was being opened thanks to Asian culinary tradition. The truth turned out to be rather less romantic than that. Once fêted as a pioneer who was doing for cloning and stem cells what Watson and Crick did for genetics, Hwang is now in disgrace. His experiments worked where others failed not because of his familiarity with noodles, but because he faked his data.

Hwang’s research had suggested that a great dream of regenerative medicine was on the verge of being fulfilled. ES cells can grow into any tissue in the human body, and could thus be used to repair the damage that causes diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and paralysis. If these master cells could be grown from embryos cloned from patients, they could be transplanted without fear of rejection. Paraplegics such as Christopher Reeve might walk again. Sir Steve Redgrave could throw away his insulin.

The alleged fraud has shaken faith in this promising frontier of medical science. There is now no proof that cloned human embryos can be created in a state from which ES cells can be harvested. While a British team has cloned an embryo, it died within days. Many scientists think that human cloning, which Hwang had made look so easy, is almost prohibitively hard. Doctors are not going to be curing the sick with cloned stem cells for some time to come. It has also played into the hands of the technology’s opponents. Embryo rights activists who object not only to cloning but to any use of ES cells have seized on Hwang’s downfall to stir public doubts about the probity and potential of the entire field. If the stem cell emperor is clothed in nothing but hype and deception, they contend, shouldn’t this research be shut down? Does it really deserve the £520 million that Britain is being urged to invest over the next decade?

This argument, however, rests on a pair of fallacies. Hwang’s reprehensible behaviour does not in any way justify ad hominem attacks on other scientists, such as Alison Murdoch, at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, who are pursuing similar work. That one researcher has fabricated data does not mean that others are bound to do the same, and Britain’s strict embryo research rules provide strong safeguards that should prevent similar abuses here. The critics are also exploiting a common misconception that therapeutic cloning and stem cell research are essentially the same thing. There is a widespread assumption that all scientists investigating the medical possibilities of ES cells are also engaged in cloning, and that the latter procedure is critical to using stem cells to treat disease. In fact, the number of teams worldwide who are trying to clone embryos can be counted on the fingers of one hand. What is more, most stem cell specialists consider cloning to be little more than an interesting tangent that will not lead to therapies in the short to medium term.

The Hwang affair is a setback, but it does not have any bearing on the potential of the wider field. This was true even before doubts began to surface about his work. Cloned embryos might be the ideal source of therapeutic stem cells, but they are not going to be a practical one for the foreseeable future. To create them, one must first have plenty of human eggs, and this raw material is in very short supply. Egg donation is complicated and risky for the donor, and there are insufficient quantities available to treat infertile couples, let alone to serve regenerative medicine. The idea there will be enough to treat Britain’s 120,000 Parkinson’s patients, let alone two million diabetics, with tailor-made clones is monumentally far-fetched.

Mainstream scientists are concentrating instead on common-or-garden ES cells, the kind that can be extracted from surplus embryos left over after IVF. These are what Ian Wilmut was talking about this week when he advocated testing stem cells on terminally ill patients. Wilmut might be renowned as the creator of Dolly, the cloned sheep, but he is well aware that the therapeutic promise of ES cells need not rely on cloning.

Other options are going to bring medical benefits much sooner, and at lower cost. This will be done by establishing banks containing hundreds of ES cell colonies or “lines”, which could be matched to patients in need of a transplant case by case, in much the same way as bone marrow or organs are today. The cells would not always give the precise genetic match that clones would provide, but this will not always matter. This month, a paper published in The Lancet suggested that as few as ten lines could stock a national bank with suitable cells for treating 80 per cent of the population, so long as they come from embryos with common tissue types. Though more research is needed before such cells could be given to patients, even in terminal cases, this is where the immediate future of the field lies. Hwang’s work is irrelevant to it.

None of this means that therapeutic cloning is without promise. Wilmut, for example, is seeking to clone cells from patients with motor neuron disease, not to provide replacement tissue but to create genetic models for research. Stem cell medicine, however, was never going to depend on clones for all, even had Hwang’s achievements held up. His tarnished reputation closes a shabby sub-plot. It is not the end of the story.

Mark Henderson is science correspondent of The Times

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