Things that suck: Hwang Woo Suk and the Suktones

Okay, I hate to bump Fred Armisen (my favorite comedian) today, but this is just too good to pass up.

The photos to the right is pictured on the front page of Boston.com today, and link to a story called, "Photos Cast New Doubt on Cloning". The article calls into question the paper submitted in 2004 by a South Korean team who claims to have been the first team to clone human cells.

In the article, Gareth Cook claims to have "showed the photos to four stem cell experts, and all said they appeared to be identical, down to the smallest detail."

Umm...isn't that the point? They're friggin CLONES! Besides, aren't they really questioning whether or not the photos were cloned? If that's the case, what the hell do stem cell experts know about that? Do they moonlight at Ritz Camera on the weekends?

Of course, this was also said:

...Hwang Woo Suk, leader of the Korean cloning team, said that he intended to retract a 2005 Science paper in which he claimed to have improved his cloning method, after concerns were raised about that paper. The duplicate photos in the 2004 article now call into question his original claim. Hwang is the only scientist to claim to have cloned human stem cells; if his 2004 paper is discredited, it would mean that the daunting hurdles to human cloning, which Hwang had claimed to overcome, remain.

It is my belief, if this is indeed true, that Hwang Woo Suk sucks. Although, I'm willing to bet that the man they're interviewing, who seems to have no answers, is a clone himself. See The Island for more details.

Hwang could not be reached by e-mail last night.

This article just keeps getting better and better.

The photos appear to be copied, ''and that calls the entire paper into question," said Dr. Robert Lanza, a scientist at Advanced Cell Technology, a Worcester-based biotech that has worked on cloning human cells, and is a competitor of Hwang's. ''There seems to be a pattern here."

By saying "There seems to be a pattern here," aren't you in fact contradicting yourself, Doc? Isn't that the point of a clone!

More Daily Show fodder:

"By yesterday, all three of Hwang's seminal papers -- two on cloning human cells, and one on cloning a dog -- were under investigation."

Please tell me that nobody is surprised to find out that a Korean cloned a dog first. And I'm guessing that it was right around dinnertime.

More Lanza sounding more like Tony Danza:

Lanza raised questions about two other papers published by members of Hwang's team. In one paper...the results of a test done on two different groups of cells is presented...[t]he test generates dark blobs, but two of these blobs seem to look precisely the same, except flipped.

Is that same as saying "they're the same...except, different."

The senior author of this paper could not be reached by e-mail last night.

Go figure. Dare I say...CLONE?

However, Lanza said, scientists could verify whether the dog was actually cloned with a simple genetic test that looks at the mitochondrial DNA, a small amount of DNA outside the nucleus of every cell. If the dog is truly a clone, then it should have different mitochondrial DNA from the other dog.

I'm guessing the dog and dog clones are already "expired". And by "expired", I mean, "yummy".