Stem Cell Therapy: Under-promise and Over-deliver

From VesCell: We've made a habit of under-promising and over-delivering for good reason. Below is a heart-breaking example of how over-promising and under-delivering can devistate good, honest people - even children.

Many in the medical establishment accepted Dr. Hwang's scientific "evidence" regarding embryonic stem cells with alacrity because he was telling them what they wanted to hear. These are the same people who choose not believe any medical facts we provide to them regarding patients improving after receiving adult stem cell therapy to treat heart diseases such as dilated cardiomyopathy. (They won't even believe before and after MRIs) Go Figure!


Hopes Founder on 'Big Lie'

Scientific scandal has shattered the vow made by a South Korean veterinarian that cloned stem cells would help a paralyzed boy walk.

By Barbara Demick, Times Staff Writer

SIHEUNG, South Korea — The boy who became known as "Donor 2" was propped up in a wheelchair when a team of esteemed scientists strolled into his hospital room nearly three years ago.

Nine-year-old Kim Hyeoni had been hit by a car while crossing the street the previous year. Once a chubby-cheeked child who loved baseball and practical jokes, he now was paralyzed from the chest down.

"Sir, will I be able to stand up and walk again?" he asked the leader of the team, a South Korean veterinarian named Hwang Woo Suk, according to an account by his father.

"I will make you walk. I promise," replied Hwang, who would soon afterward announce a breakthrough in the cloning of human stem cells.

With that meeting in April 2003, Hyeoni in effect became a poster boy in the quest to use cloned stem cells for experimental treatments of spinal-cord injuries.

His father, a Methodist minister, defied the beliefs of many of his fellow church members and allowed Hwang to cut skin samples from his son's abdomen for the research. Hyeoni's mother, a nurse, volunteered for the invasive procedure of having her eggs extracted to donate to Hwang's laboratory.

Now the family is faced with the sinking realization that "it was all a big lie," said Kim Je Eon, the boy's 43-year-old father.

The family's saga captures at its most vivid the disappointment felt by millions around the world.

Not only has much of Hwang's work proved to be a fabrication, the scandal surrounding him is believed to have set back legitimate research for years.

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