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Korean researcher fired for fraud

A South Korean scientist who once said he wanted "to become another Hwang Woo-Suk for Korea" has come ironically close to his goal. Kim Tae-kook, a bioscience professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in the central South Korean city of Daejeon, was suspended on Friday for fabricating data in two papers, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). linkurl:One of the papers;http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/309/5731/121, published in Science in 2005, deve

Elie Dolgin
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A South Korean scientist who once said he wanted "to become another Hwang Woo-Suk for Korea" has come ironically close to his goal. Kim Tae-kook, a bioscience professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in the central South Korean city of Daejeon, was suspended on Friday for fabricating data in two papers, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). linkurl:One of the papers;http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/309/5731/121, published in Science in 2005, developed a technique for identifying molecular targets in human cells, and has been cited 34 times, according to ISI. linkurl:The second paper;http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/v2/n7/abs/nchembio800.html, published in Nature Chemical Biology in 2006, proposed ways of manipulating human cells to increase their lifespan. That study has been cited 5 times. The fraud was first reported by one of Kim's postgraduate students, after the student tried and failed to replicate the experiments. Further investigation indicated that Kim deliberately "manipulated microscopic photos to fabricate study results," Lee Gyun-Min, KAIST's head of biological sciences, told the AFP on Friday. KAIST has notified both journals about the findings. In 2005, linkurl:Hwang Woo-Suk resigned;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22870/ from Seoul National University, after an investigation showed that data in his 2004 paper in Science, in which he allegedly extracted stem cells from the first cloned human embryos, had been fabricated.
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