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In a further headache for Korea¡¯s embattled cloning pioneer Prof. Hwang Woo-suk, a sometime collaborator says a separate team of researchers at the MizMedi Hospital in Seoul accidentally illustrated a recent paper with photos of the same stem cells that were pictured to accompany a contentious Hwang article in June. That confirms allegations earlier raised on the Internet. But since the pictures accompanying Hwang¡¯s June article in Science are also compromised, the revelation adds fuel to suspicions that Hwang¡¯s team pictured frozen embryonic stem cells incubated at MizMedi Hospital in 2002, and not the world¡¯s first stem cells tailored to patients¡¯ DNA it claimed to have produced.
Roh Sung-il, the hospital¡¯s chief and co-author of the recent MizMedi paper, said Thursday the mistake resulted from ¡°the strangest coincidence,¡± adding the hospital¡¯s article had already been withdrawn. Co-authored with Chun Sung-hye of Seoul National University and Kim Sun-jong, who now works at the University of Pittsburgh, the MizMedi article was submitted to the U.S. journal Biology of Reproduction.
Members of the Association of Korean Scientists and Engineers (www.scieng.net), the Biological Research Information Center (BRIC), and the Science Gallery of DC Inside posted messages in the organizations¡¯ respective websites saying the stem cell in picture no. 5 accompanying Hwang¡¯s article in Science and picture no. 1 in the MizMedi article are virtually the same.
Several people earlier used websites to log their doubts about the pictures accompanying Hwang¡¯s Science article, saying pictures 5, 6 and 9 and 3, 4, 7, 8, and 11 are of the same two stem cells. Some have concluded that only three out of 11 tailored stem cells Hwang¡¯s team said it cloned actually exist, with the possible addition of stem cell no. 12, which was not pictured.
Chun posted a message on the DC Inside and BRIC websites, where he said the mistake was due to confusion of the folders where the pictures had been saved. The MizMedi article has been withdrawn and will be resubmitted after changing the photos, he added.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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