Disgraced cloning scientist on fraud charges

South Korean prosecutors today indicted disgraced cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk for alleged fraud, embezzlement and bioethics violations in a scandal over faked stem cell research that shook the world scientific community.

However, prosecutors said they accepted one key argument Hwang has used in his defence that some of his now-discredited claims were due to a junior researcher deceiving him into believing his lab successfully created patient-specific stem cells from cloned embryos.

Prosecution official Lee In-kyu announced the indictments of Hwang and five members of his research team during a nationally-televised news conference.

Lee said prosecutors had decided not to take them into custody.

Hwang – once hailed as a stem cell pioneer and treated as a national hero - was fired in March from his post as a professor at Seoul National University’s veterinary department after admitting he fabricated data for two high-profile papers published in academic journals in 2004 and 2005.

Their claims of advances in embryonic stem cells – basic human cells that can develop into nearly any kind of tissue – had offered hope of new treatments for millions of patients suffering from debilitating diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Creating patient-specific stem cells, with a patient’s own DNA, would be a key breakthrough because they theoretically could be used for treatments to replace sick cells with the assurance that they would not be rejected by the body.

Hwang was charged with fraud for accepting 2 billion won (£1.1million) in private donations based on the outcome of the falsified research, Lee said. Hwang also embezzled about 800 million won (£459,000) in private and government research funds.

Hwang also paid money to receive human eggs for research, a violation of the country’s bioethics law, Lee said.

Prosecutors said Hwang falsified his research papers, but decided not to charge him for that, because “there has been no precedent in the world” of bringing criminal charges for fabricating academic papers.

Of the five researchers, one was indicted for tampering with research samples, three for fraud and one for violation of the bioethics law.

Prosecutors said Hwang faked the two research papers, but they did not draw a clear conclusion on whether he ever created a cloned human embryo and extracted a stem cell from it as reported in the 2004 paper.

Seoul National University, where Hwang worked as a professor, has said Hwang’s purported first cloned embryonic stem cell, reported in the 2004 paper, could have merely been from a mutated egg, which could appear to have qualities of a cloned embryo.

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 fertilised 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.