Sun Jin-ho, the dean of research affairs at SNU, said, "We've already spent W140 million (US$1=W1,308) in the patent application process, and we still need hundreds of millions of won more. We've decided to withdraw our applications because we feel we'll only have very limited patent rights even if we get them because each country's patent office makes an issue of the violation of bioethics laws" in the process of Hwang's fraudulent research.

The patent applications concern the process used in producing a human stem cell line Hwang's team announced in the U.S. journal Science in 2004. SNU asked this to be recognized as a technique for cloning stem cells through somatic cell nuclear transfer, together with a material patent for the NT-1 line, the only one the team apparently did manage to create.

Nineteen members of Hwang's former team are named as the inventors in the patent applications, but SNU filed them in the name of the SNU Industry Foundation because of a legal stipulation that makes all research done by professors at national universities while in office property of the state.

Hwang's attempt to breed patient-specific stem cells was exposed as a fraud and involved breaches of bioethics laws in what appears to have been a massive waste of bought donors' eggs to cover up his failures.

(englishnews@chosun.com )