Korea Stem Cell Fraud

To the shock of the South Korean nation, Hwang Woo Suk, the world renowned cloning pioneer, admitted to a colleague that his that the majority of his famous paper's data regarding human embryo cloning published in Science earlier this year was in fact "fake."

The journal Science, which has until now consistently supported Hwang in spite of the growing suspicions of the international media regarding the authenticity of the research paper published in May, have not yet publicly responded to today's events.

According to sources Prof. Hwang's confession verified the fact that actually nine of the 11 stem cells referred to in the paper did not actually exist, and were actually invented by Hwang himself with the knowledge of only three others in his laboratory.

According to reports by the media here, Hwang had ordered one of the junior scientists in his lab team to have three original stem cells and DNA fingerprint samples duplicated and then doctored so as to make it look like there were in fact 11 cells that were a success in their research.

All of Hwang's famous breakthroughs in cloning, such as the cloning of a calf in 1999, would come under serious questioning by the international science community.

The reason given by sources published in the media here, for Hwang's faking of data in the Science article, was that he felt pressurized by the science community to get results, since his team had used several hundred donated ova for the research.

In similar research done in 2004, Hwang had succeeded in creating only one successful cell line, despite having used over 200 ova, which lead to criticism overseas for his squandering such a valuable resources.

Other analysts point to the cost of the research to explain Hwang's actions. The South Korean government has invested more than $26 million in his stem cell project and any failure on the part of Hwang's team would have probably jeopardized future investment by the government.

The timing of Hwang's admission of fault to Roh after a month of silence, during which the suspicions of the international science community grew steadily, seemingly corresponds with the beginning of SNU's investigation of the pioneer cloning scientist's data and their request for Hwang to provide evidence of his research.

Another explanation for Hwang's confession today is the request made three days ago by one of his co-authors, Gerald Schatten of Pittsburgh University, to have his name removed from the article. Schatten explained in a letter to the scientific journal that he had received information from an unnamed source that much of the data used in the article had in fact been doctored.

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