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The man who faked human cloning

3 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this documentary2 months2023 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Recommended as a gripping account of scientific fraud and the history of cloning research.

BobbyBroccoli's first of two long documentaries about Hwang Woo-suk, the South Korean scientist who faked human cloning results. It tells the story of the scandal that shook a country.

“I'd recommend watching this video [1].” (HN, 2023)

2 recommendations · 2 citations · Documentaries

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@xmprt Oct 2023 Recommends
on HN thread Don't worry about global population collapse
Wars don't just appear out of thin air. There were a lot of incentives for countries to engage in war. Cloning doesn't really benefit anyone and doing cloning requires a ton of funding and grants and ethics boards reviews. If you're interested in the history of human cloning (and where that field of research is trending towards), I'd recommend watching this video [1]. Full human cloning is somewhat pointless however the research has lead to innovations in stem cell research which does have real benefits for things like organ transplants. [1] [this video]
History of human cloning research.
@mbaye Dec 2023 Recommends
on HN thread Ask HN: What are the YouTube channel worth to follow in 2024?
Bobby Broccoli: [link] Documentaries about daring scientific fraud such as "The man who tried to fake an element" [link] or "The man who faked human cloning" [this video] Or the epic tale of political intrigue in "The $21,000,000,000 hole in Texas" [link] about the The Superconducting Super Collider that never was.
Documentaries about daring scientific fraud.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@ouraf Jul 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer
Read more
It is as bad in medicine, if not worse. Recently a very influential paper about alzheimer was pulled[1] because of almost everything you said, but for biology instead: data fabrication, overestimating numbers, etc. There's also a case related with cloning (which includes stem cell research) and massive fraud in South Korea 20 or so years ago.[2] It's a complicated matter: research is a beacon of light on top of a mountain of failed experiments. And not even the government will fund a mountain of failures if your shining discovery at the end can't bring returns to society (or shareholders) in greater value than what you took. And the pharmaceutical industry never settled for small results. And, unlike ML, it's much harder to test things as an outsider (you can hate the hype, but openAI, hugging face and all these "open" language models makes it much easier to learn, test, tweak and improve things without a master's degree in data engineering.). It's a grimy area to research even as a pastime. There's a lot of recorded practices both in research and production that makes you question how low can a person go for money 1: [link] 2: [this video]
Case of cloning fraud in South Korea.
@evrimoztamur Jul 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Argonne National Lab is attempting to replicate LK-99
...or the next BobbyBroccoli special like the one on Hwang Woo-suk, the man who faked human cloning ( [this video] ). Not claiming the researchers of LK99 are intentionally faking their results, by the way!
Documentary on Hwang Woo-suk's faked cloning.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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