Three senior stem cell scientists have quit the Editorial board of an electronic journal to protest the publication of the much heralded “first cloned human embryo” paper released, Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer in Humans: Pronuclear and Early Embryonic Development.

Cast as pioneering research by the world wide media, the paper reported work by Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology (ACT)-a small firm working towards therapeutic cloning with human and animal cells. They applied nuclear transfer to 17 donor eggs to create the first cloned human 'embryos', 3 of which reached the 6-cell stage of division before dying. However, Davor Solter from the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology in Germany, John Gearhart of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Robin Lovell-Badge of the National Institute for Medical Research in London felt that they could not endorse the findings published in The Journal of Regenerative Medicine, and have resigned from the journal's board.

Their action compounds the unease of other prominent researchers such as Ian Wilmut, the embryologist at Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland who helped to create Dolly. “Nuclear transfer to produce human embryos is a very important area of research,” says Wilmut. “However, the (ACT) research is very preliminary and not ready for publication.”

But editorial Board member, Tim Brazelton of Stanford Medical School had no problem with the study. “If I had been asked to review the article, I would have accepted it,” he says. “It's preliminary but important.” As an online journal, it is willing to accept early data from ongoing research so as to allow scientists to quickly integrate new methods into their own experiments, says Brazelton, acknowledging that this is “pushing the boundaries a little bit.”

Solter says that the first he heard about the paper was from a reporter who called to ask his opinion. After reading the paper he was unimpressed. The results were overstated and not supported by the published data, he says. “Eggs have a tendency to fragment... You would have to prove...that you have cells there. I cannot see that this paper can claim that any of these embryos developed.”

As an avenue of research, stem cells have all the right ingredients to make a winning newspaper story: ethical dilemmas, political angles, medical potential and big money for those who are successful. “All of these things are a bad mix in terms of science and orderly publishing,” comments Drummond Rennie, deputy editor with The Journal of the American Medical Association. “They bring out the skirting of the peer-review system. It's a mix that brings out the worst in everybody.”

For example, University of Minnesota researcher, Catherine Verfaillie, was waiting to hear whether a journal had accepted her paper describing isolation of omnipotent stem cells from bone marrow of adult mice when she was contacted by the New Scientist. She spoke to the magazine “to make sure what they were going to say is accurate,” and several front-page daily newspaper reports followed. And last month, British newspapers announced that ACT had used cells from cloned cow embryos to grow functioning kidney cells even though the work has not yet been submitted to a journal for consideration.

ACT's credibility with the scientific community was partially redeemed by a new Science paper on the use of parthenogenesis to trigger the development of monkey oocytes (Science 295, 819; 2002). Several reached the blastocyte stage before dying, and a single cell from a monkey named Buttercup produced stem cells. Jose Cibelli, ACT's chief scientist, bristles at criticism of the human 'embryo' paper, which he considers to be just as worthy of publication as the monkey paper. “I think they are both important,” he says. “When you talk about humans, any data is important because these are humans.”