Reply #4: Credit for U.S. journal article at issue

[struggle4progress]

A leader of a Hollywood hospital's parent firm was listed as the fertility piece's main author. But a fellow Korean says it's a copy of his thesis.

By Charles Ornstein, Times Staff Writer
February 18, 2007

A prominent fertility scientist whose firm owns Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles is embroiled in a plagiarism dispute that straddles two continents, has triggered legal battles in South Korea and has raised questions about the practices of a leading U.S. fertility journal.

Dr. Kwang-Yul Cha, whose company also owns fertility clinics and a large hospital in Seoul, is listed as the primary author on a medical paper that appeared in December 2005 in the U.S. medical journal Fertility and Sterility.

But that paper appears to be nearly a paragraph-for-paragraph, chart-for-chart copy of a junior researcher's doctoral thesis, which appeared in a Korean medical journal nearly two years earlier, according to a Times review of both papers and the findings of a Korean medical society ...

Cha, 54, has received international accolades for his work on egg freezing and is well known in medical circles in South Korea. But in the United States, he is a somewhat controversial figure. He came under criticism a few years ago for his involvement in a study suggesting that anonymous prayers from strangers might double a woman's chances of fertility ...

http://ktla.trb.com/news/la-me-research18feb18,0,1578382.story?coll=ktla-news-1

<edit: replaced duplicate story by another>