Triumphs, Troubles and Tea

It's unlikely Woo Suk Hwang imagined his year would end this way. The veterinary scientist from Seoul National University made headlines around the world earlier this year--and was celebrated as a hero in South Korea--with a pair of triumphs in stem cells and cloning‚ including the world's first cloned dog. But Hwang resigned from his post at a new stem-cell research center last week when it was revealed that he had lied about the source of some of the human eggs used in his medical research. The quality of Hwang's science is unimpeached, but the reputation of the scientist has been pummeled.

This year, as every year, the struggle against disease was a grab bag of good and bad--vision and shortsightedness, courage and obtuseness, scientific masterstrokes and experiments that came to naught. It's medicine's historical dance, with every two steps forward matched by at least one step back. In a very good year, you might push that ratio to 3 to 1. TIME's 2005 A-to-Z guide to the year in medicine tracks the highlights of the 12 months soon ending--and suggests that this year may have been one of the good ones.

By any measure, 2005's biggest medical news came out of Hwang's lab--despite the subsequent scandal. The earliest bulletin was the announcement that Hwang and his 45-person team had become the first to using cloning techniques to create stem cells from human patients suffering from diseases such as diabetes and spinal-cord injury. Tissue derived from those cells could, in theory, be implanted in the pancreas or spine with little chance that the body would rejected it. If such experiments work, the same approach could be applied to other parts of the body, such as the brain or heart.

More headline grabbing--and certainly more telegenic--was Hwang's cloned dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy (for Seoul National University puppy). Unlike sheep, cats and other animals that had previously been cloned, dogs are notoriously hard to duplicate. Their eggs can be extracted for only a few weeks each year, and canine anatomy makes removing them from the ovaries maddeningly hard. Hwang and his team had to be surgically deft to retrieve the eggs at all. But they also developed their own techniques for gently squeezing genetic material from a canine-donor egg and replacing it with the hound's genes. Both steps reduce the damage to the resulting embryo and could have implications for human therapeutic cloning.