Hwang requests Science retraction

Science said today (December 16) that Woo-suk Hwang, the Korean cloning researcher, has requested a retraction of a headline-grabbing paper on patient-specific human stem cells. The announcement follows a call for a retraction by co-author Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh and reports yesterday by Korean media that Hwang had admitted to a colleague that the paper was based on fabricated data.

In an interview yesterday (December 15) on the Korean national broadcaster MBC, Hwang's research collaborator and co-author, Sung Il Roh, said no patient-specific stem cells exist. "When I visited Hwang in hospital early this morning (Thursday), Hwang said there were no cloned embryonic stem cells at all," said Roh, head of infertility clinic Mizmedi Women's Hospital, in an interview quoted in the Korea Times.

"I have waited, thinking that Hwang would announce everything himself since only he is eligible to put a halt to all the suspicions,'' ...