Is This Why Dr. Hwang Woo-suk Committed Scientific Fraud?

TIME magazine this months has a pretty good article about the Korean stem cell controversy for those who haven’t been following it very closely. TIME does try to explain why Hwang lied about his results:

But why it happened is still a mystery. By all accounts, the tales of Hwang’s dedication and personal discipline are all true.

(…)

Hwang insisted he had no interest in profiting from his discoveries; indeed, he turned over his patent rights to the university and the government.

That being the case, it seems unlikely that Hwang set out to perpetrate fraud. But it wouldn’t be surprising if he, or someone in his lab, believed strongly enough in the work to be willing to cut corners. If that’s true, the precipitating event could have come last January, when some of his stem-cell samples became contaminated, possibly by a fungus circulating in poorly shielded air vents.

Hwang claims it took six months to recover from the disaster. But it also might be that Hwang’s team couldn’t recover quickly enough and began taking shortcuts to fill the gap. Under pressure from the government and the university, and with a deadline looming for publication in one of the world’s most prestigious journals, the temptation to stretch the truth might have been irresistible. “I can only speculate that Dr. Hwang was driven by ambition. He may have thought he could manipulate the data to secure research funding and compensate for his actions with follow-up results,” says Ki Jung Kim, a political scientist at Seoul’s Yonsei University. In short, fudge it now, fix it later.

This explanation probably makes the most sense of why he committed a fraud that was bound to be uncovered. He gambled that he could get the real results before the forgery was discovered and he lost. Just makes you wonder if he wasn’t so hyped by the media and given so much money by the government in order to speed up scientific results; that maybe he would of spent the time necessary to conduct experiments ethically and more carefully so that he could have avoided the ethical violations that began the investigation and prevented the cells from becoming contaminated during the scientific process?