However, the secret to the successes in Korea as we may guess isn't likely to be simply cash. Hwang Woo-suk points to the the motivation and further ... the manual skill of their scientists.

Woo-suk has stated that thusfar he has received seemingly very little funding for their study. One thing that is interesting though is that he said he and his colleagues, being Korean, are handy with metal chopsticks, and as a result are uniquely skilled at the delicate work involved in the cloning human embryos.

Interesting twist to the research I thought....

"We should be aware that this technology is still very demanding, and perhaps the paper does not emphasize enough that a huge part of the success is the person doing the job," said Jose Cibelli, a professor and stem-cell researcher at the University of Michigan who worked with Hwang this past year when his team announced that it had derived stem cells from a cloned human embryo for the first time.

"This work can be done much better in Oriental hands," Hwang told Nature Medicine. "We can pick up very slippery corn or rice with the steel chopsticks." Hwang also told the journal that his lab works seven days a week.

So perhaps there could be something to it .. Regardless of the reasons, I expect to hear more along these lines, despite the verbal protests flooding in from across the world.

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