South Korean Team's Remaining Human Stem Cell Claim Demolished

In an announcement that researchers worldwide both expected and feared, Woo Suk Hwang's last remaining claim to have advanced the promising field of human embryonic stem (ES) cells has been declared fraudulent. In a report released on 10 January, a committee at Seoul National University (SNU) found that Hwang and his colleagues fabricated data in their breakthrough 2004 Science paper reporting the first creation of a stem cell line from a cloned human blastocyst. In an interim report in late December, the committee had already determined that a second paper by the team, published in 2005, was fraudulent (Science, 6 January, p. 22).