Patriot Games?

The economist, a British weekly journal, diagnoses, on its own, the recent stem cell research scandal Dr. Hwang has been involved in with some doses of lessons we might learn from the episode. I post extracts here and also the link to the full story(you might have to register to read the whole thing). In Britain, meanwhile, the government has been showing strong support to, while the general public doesn't seem to take issue with, the cloning research. The journal, however, quite often not rare, has been a "doomsayer" to most scientific breakthrorughs just arising on the horizon. Are they being generous this time?

Vocabularies to learn] twisted tale, once-feted but now-disgraced, salutary, critical scrutinity, inaccurate work, controversial, human cloning, scientists of becoming celebrities, fickle, hubris and vanity, nationalism and science, uneasy bedfellows, a scientific power, a fatally flawed piece of research, deluded scientific nationalism, Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet geneticist, Manhattan project

Quote of the day] “Nature does not bend to a scientist’s will, however much he or his audience may wish it might.”

The truth will out (extract from full story)

Compared with these dire examples of waste and destruction, Dr Hwang's mistake looks relatively modest. Those opposed to human cloning may raise a cheer or two that a great leap forward which they had feared seems not to have happened. But, as the Nazis discovered, denying reality just because you don't like it is equally foolish. Eventually, somebody probably will clone a human being. Just not, perhaps, in South Korea.