Re:Schatten sure took his time severing those ties (Score 1)

What the submitter left out was this nice bit:

> Dr. Schatten, who was to have led the organization's
> board of directors, says he is now severing collaboration
> with Dr. Hwang, due to questions over the source of human
> eggs used in a 2004 cloning project, and errors in a 2005
> paper coauthored by the scientists. A 2004 news report
> in the journal Nature said at least one female laboratory
> worker had provided eggs for the project, an allegation
> that Dr. Hwang has denied on several occasions.

Is it just me, or does it look like Schatten didn't have a problem with the forced collection, only starting to sever ties (note the tense there: "is now severing", ie, he hasn't finished?) after problems come up with a paper?

Well, there are a few things you maybe do not know about scientific collaboration projects. When people from different institutions work together, they do not always know all the technical details of the work of each other. There is trust about details which are not of competence of the others. For example I am writing a paper with a colleague from Canada, where I am supposed to implement a specific algorithm he wrote: He does not need to see my code, he need to see the timings. FWIW, I could have asked a "slave" to write it: I did not, but if I did and I did not acknowledge this, this would have been unethical.

Hence, one can assume in good faith that Dr. Schatten did not know the source of the eggs when the paper was written (presumably not later than early 2004). Then the paper was submitted and accepted for publication - scientific journals have a big backlog and the paper was supposed to be in print in 2005. It could have even been that online publication was in 2005 and print in 2006, I did not check this.

If the Nature report was published in 2004, it is simply impossible that the paper was not yet written and that it appears in print now. The paper must have been written before the allegiations have been made.

Now, of course it is entirely possible that he knew what was happening and he did not care about it until the source of the eggs was made known. I have seen worse in the scientific community. Somebody else mentioned prostitutions in this discussion: I have seen entire academic carreers built around a vagina...