The ‘National Hero’ Who Faked Human Cloning
We revere scientific progress, for the promise it holds for a better life and for the possible future it represents. We also fear that progress, its capacity for transgression in a field that the layperson struggles to understand. The new Netflix documentary King of Clones presents a smart look at this dichotomy, a cautionary tale of a Korean genetic researcher whose revolutionary findings proved too good to be true.
Hwang Woo-suk is a pioneer in the field of cloning, a scientist who became a national hero for his work in stem cell research and its vast medical possibilities. Racing camels, dogs, sheep, pigs: all were successfully cloned. (Hwang’s company, Sooam Biotech, has cloned hundreds of dogs.) But this was something different. Hwang’s claim that he and his team had extracted stem cells from cloned human embryos held out a panacea of possible medical cures, as well as the specter of human cloning. When Hwang announced his findings and advances in a pair of articles in the journal Science in 2004 and 2005, he was widely received as a God-like figure in his native country. This reception continued even after journalists and a whistleblower from his own lab exposed him as an unethical fraud who illegally obtained human embryos, including many from his own graduate students, and lied about his misdeeds, even falsifying raw data. As Hwang offers as a defense of sorts, “In science, you can’t dismiss a path just because it’s reckless.” He also says he would do it all again if given the chance.
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Director/executive producer Aditya Thayi uses methods both playful – clips of Frankenstein and Superman, whose late star, Christopher Reeve, became a stem cell research advocate – and serious, sometimes melding these approaches into something ultimately quite human. We meet the man who had his dearly departed French bulldog cloned and kept the original stored in his fridge, a subplot that plays like something from a people-are-strange Errol Morris project. There’s the Australian veterinarian who helped Hwang clone a ginormous racing camel, which went over big on the camel’s home turf of Abu Dhabi. “Does it feel like a God complex?” the vet asks rhetorically. “Yes, unfortunately it does.”
King of Clones sets up shop at the intersection of science, ethics, human nature and, perhaps most intriguingly, nationalism. The journalists, Korean and American, who exposed Hwang were vilified in South Korea for having the temerity to take down a national hero. He played the media like a Stradivarius, not just insisting on his innocence but stoking the flames of national pride at every opportunity. After his disgrace – in addition to his ethical violations, Hwang was also found guilty of fraud and embezzlement – he joined a team in Siberia that excavated mammoth remains from a frozen cave and set about trying to clone the prehistoric beast. In the film, he explains his vision of using a mammoth belt to unify South and North Korea, which is, at the very least, quite a mental image. My country, right or wrong or woolly.
Hwang’s most striking quality is his complete lack of remorse or ethical introspection. Progress, to him, is a one-way street, to be achieved at whatever cost must be paid. The ethical exemplars here are the journalists and the whistleblower, who address the hazards of placing ends before means. That they emerge as heroes for merely doing the right thing is rather sad, but there’s something about the directness and simplicity of their purpose that stands out in this morass. In a story and setting where so many want to fly close to the sun, they see the value of keeping things honest back on planet Earth.
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