Hwang faked results, says panel

A Seoul National University (SNU) panel investigating a groundbreaking 2005 embryonic stem cell paper in Science announced Friday (December 23) that the team led by Hwang Woo-suk fabricated the results for at least 9 stem cell lines. In response, Hwang resigned from SNU.

Although Hwang said he created 11 stem cell lines, only two were present when he and his co-authors submitted their results for publication, the SNU investigation committee concluded in an interim report. Among the nine lines that remain unaccounted for, four were reportedly destroyed by contamination in January, three were not confirmed as stem cell lines before Hwang submitted the data to Science, and the other two lines have no records, according to the report.

"This leads to the conclusion that the experimental data submitted to Science in support of 11 stem cell lines (DNA fingerprinting, microscopic photos, confirmation of teratomas) were all derived from two cell ...