SEOUL, South Korea, Friday, Dec. 23 (AP) - The South Korean researcher Hwang Woo Suk faked results of at least 9 of 11 stem cell lines he claimed to have created, his university said Friday, in the first confirmation of allegations casting suspicion on his purported breakthroughs.
In a May paper in the journal Science, Dr. Hwang claimed to have created 11 stem cell lines matched to patients in an achievement that raised hopes of creating tailored therapies for diseases. But one of his former collaborators said last week that 9 of the 11 cell lines had been faked, prompting reviews by the journal and Seoul National University, where Dr. Hwang works.
In its first progress report on Friday, a panel at the university said it had found that "the laboratory data for 11 stem cell lines that were reported in the 2005 paper were all data made using two stem cell lines in total." The panel said DNA tests currently being performed would confirm if the remaining two stem cell lines had actually been successfully cloned from a patient.
To create fake DNA results purporting to show a match, the university said, Dr. Hwang's team split cells from one patient into two test tubes for the analysis - rather than actually match cloned cells to a patient's original cells. "Based on these facts, the data in the 2005 Science paper cannot be some error from a simple mistake, but cannot be but seen as a deliberate fabrication to make it look like 11 stem cell lines using results from just 2," it said.
The panel said it would now also investigate Dr. Hwang's other landmark papers, which include another Science article in 2004 on the world's first cloned human embryos, and an August 2005 paper in the journal Nature on the first cloned dog.
Dr. Hwang has maintained his science is sound and that tests will prove his case. But he admitted last week to "fatal errors" in the May report and asked Science to withdraw the paper. He acknowledged that at the time of publication, his team had created only eight cell lines. But he said three more were created later.
The panel said Friday that it had found no records of two of the other stem cell lines Dr. Hwang claims to have created.
