Disgraced cloning expert blames colleague

[emad]

Disgraced cloning expert blames colleague
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 27/12/2005)

The scandal over the fabrication of data purporting to show the cloning of human embryos deepened yesterday.

As South Korea's top university received some of the DNA test results that will be crucial for its investigation, the disgraced stem cell researcher Dr Hwang Woo-suk has implicated another scientist in the furore. Seoul National University commissioned the DNA tests to determine whether he ever created patient-matched stem cells via cloning, as he claimed in the journal Science.

On Friday, the panel said data on at least nine of 11 stem cell lines that Hwang claimed to create via cloned embryos were fabricated. The Yonhap news agency claimed in an unconfirmed report circulating yesterday that the DNA tests would not clear Hwang on the remaining two stem cell lines.

It has also emerged that Hwang filed a petition with the Seoul central district prosecutor's office asking it to investigate whether his collaborators at MizMedi hospital replaced his therapeutic-cloning stem cells with samples from a fertility clinic.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/27/woosuk27.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/12/27/ixworld.html