WOO SUK HWANG was a national hero in South Korea, a man acclaimed as the world’s leading stem-cell scientist and credited with creating the first cloned dog.

But yesterday he was a broken man after an investigation concluded that he had fabricated the evidence underpinning his work.

After resigning in disgrace, having dashed the hopes of millions suffering from hard-to-cure diseases, the professor offered a “sincere apology”. The Government declared itself “miserable” and opposition parties described the news as devastating.

The Ministry of Science and Technology responded by withdrawing his funding and students wept outside the prestigious Seoul National University where he worked.

Professor Hwang now faces possible prosecution, and even his claim to have cloned an Afghan hound named Snuppy is in doubt. “I sincerely apologise to the people for causing such big shocks and disappointment,” he said as he left his office.

An investigation by the university into the work of its star professor ruled that he had fabricated key parts of a study published in May that purported to show the creation of the world’s first human embryonic stem (ES) cells cloned from cells of real patients.

Such cells potentially could be transplanted into patients suffering, for instance, from degenerative diseases, replacing damaged tissue without risk of rejection by the body’s immune system. This process, known as “therapeutic cloning”, is one of the most exciting new frontiers in medicine.

However, the panel concluded that at least nine of the eleven lines of tailored cells featured in the paper published in the journal Science had not existed, and that Professor Hwang had manipulated the results of DNA fingerprinting to make failed experiments look as if they had succeeded.

“Based on these facts, the data in the 2005 Science paper cannot be some error from a simple mistake, but can only be seen as a deliberate fabrication to make it look like 11 stem-cell lines using results from just two,” it said. “This kind of error is a grave act that damages the foundation of science.”

The university is now arranging independent genetic tests on the remaining two cell lines, which should determine whether these were indeed cloned from patients, as Professor Hwang still claims. It will also examine Professor Hwang’s two other breakthrough papers — another Science study of February 2004 in which he claimed to have cloned the first human embryo and extracted stem cells, and the creation of the first cloned dog, which was announced in Nature in August this year.

Both journals are currently reviewing this work, which independent experts said appeared increasingly dubious in light of yesterday’s ruling. The 2004 cloning study is alleged to contain duplicate photographs, and the paper reporting the birth of Snuppy did not include DNA tests that were needed to prove the dog was a true clone.

Alan Trounson, a stem-cell expert at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, said: “I think a lot of the community were very impressed with the cloning of a dog — and it was a delightful dog — but I actually don’t think it is a cloned dog now.”

Professor Hwang yesterday stood by his claim to have cloned human embryos and made patient-specific stem cells. “I emphasise that patient- specific stem cells belong to South Korea and you are going to see this,” he said.

But other scientists said that the revelations called into question whether it was yet possible to obtain ES cells from cloned human embryos. While British and Chinese teams have also produced cloned embryos, only the Korean team had so far been able to use these to make stem-cell lines.

“We thought a fundamental question had been answered,” said Alison Murdoch, of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, who leads the British cloning team. “Hwang’s results shifted the research focus on to emulating his work. Now we may need to look again at that fundamental step.”

Doubts began to surface last month when Gerald Schatten, of the University of Pittsburgh, ended his association with the Korean laboratory after it emerged that it had used eggs donated by junior researchers.

This practice is widely considered unethical because of the potential for coercion. Professor Schatten and another of Professor Hwang’s collaborators, Sung Il Roh, then questioned the authenticity of the stem cells.

South Koreans blamed Professor Hwang’s fraud on their society. The Government in Seoul had given him millions of dollars in research funding. It established a World Stem Cell Hub, opened two months ago by President Roh, and praised Professor Hwang’s accomplishments as symbolic of the country’s rise. It had also commissioned stamps showing a patient rising from a wheelchair as a result of his work.

“I understand what drove Hwang into this state. The pressure to achieve something was enormous,” Oh Il Hwan, a professor at South Korea’s Catholic University, said.

DARK SCIENCE OF FRAUD

• The most famous fraud, and one of the most damaging, was Piltdown skull, found in a quarry in Sussex in 1912. A clever concoction by an unknown forger, the skull purported to be the “missing link” between humans and apes. It took 40 years for dating techniques to expose the fraud
• Sir Cyril Burt, the educational psychologist, systematically invented data to support his theories about the hereditary component in IQ. Only after his death in 1971 were doubts raised
• William McBride, a leading Australian gynaecologist, earned plaudits as one of those who revealed the dangers of thalidomide. Years later he made similar but unjustified claims about another drug, Debendox, driving it off the market. He finally admitted faking data “in interests of humanity”

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