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South Korean cloning scientist indicted
(AP)
Updated: 2006-05-12 11:51 In February, the Board of Audit and Inspection said it was unclear how Hwang
spent 2.5 billion won (US$2.6 million; euro2 million) he received in government
funds and private donations for his research.
Supporters of South
Korean stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk weep after hearing the
announcement of the result of the prosecutors' investigation into the team
led by Hwang, in front of the Seoul district public prosecutors' office
May 12, 2006. Hwang, once hailed as a national hero, has been charged with
criminal fraud and embezzlement, a senior prosecutor said on Friday.
[Reuters] |
Through last year, Hwang received
30.9 billion won (US$33 million; euro25 million) in government funds for his
research as well as 6 billion won (US$6.4 million; euro4.9 million) in private
donations, the audit board said.
Prosecutors on Friday also backed up
earlier findings by Seoul National University that Hwang's research team had not
created the world's first cloned human embryos and extracted stem cells from
them, including those genetically matched to patients, as they had claimed.
Those claims were published in the two papers in 2004 and
2005.
Prosecutors, however, concluded that Hwang's allegation that
a junior researcher deceived him into believing that the team successfully
created patient-specific stem cells was true.
Kim Sun-jong, who was
indicted for tampering, brought ordinary stem cells - created from fertilized
eggs, not from cloned embryos - to the lab to make them look like
patient-specific stem cells, prosecution official Lee said.
Kim, a
specialist in cultivating embryos, committed the wrongdoing "under psychological
pressure" to accomplish his duties and "out of desire to succeed as a scholar,"
Lee said.
That made Hwang believe that he had succeeded in creating
patient-specific stem cells, Lee said. Based on those wrong samples, Hwang
carried out further fabrication of data to write the 2005 paper, Lee said. It
was unclear when Hwang became aware he had been deceived.
Outside the
prosecutors' office in southern Seoul, about two dozen people staged a rally in
support of Hwang, calling for him to continue his
research.
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