Suspended term upheld for Hwang

Hwang Woo-suk By Park Si-soo An appellate court Thursday upheld a ruling that found Hwang Woo-suk — the cloning scientist disgraced for falsely claiming a major breakthrough in stem-cell research — guilty of embezzlement of government research funds and the illegal use of human ova. The court also confirmed the one-and-a-half year jail sentence suspended for two years. It dismissed one embezzlement charge involving $100,000 citing lack of evidence. The 57-year-old scientist was indicted in 2006 on charges of misusing nearly $800,000 in funds from the government and two Korean firms — SK Group and Nonghyup — and illegally buying human ova for his research. Hwang obtained the funds using papers published in the journal Science in 2004 and 2005 — later retracted — that were based on fabricated data, which constituted fraud, according to prosecutors. The appellate court made no judgment on the test fabrications, saying it would leave that to the discretion of the science community. Judge Lee Sung-ho of the Seoul High Court said Hwang had obviously spent state research funds for personal use and violated bioethics laws. “The funds given by the government were not for an individual recipient — Hwang — but to conduct biotechnology research,” the judge said, upholding the embezzlement charge against the scientist. However, Lee said there was no causal relationship between the funds he obtained from the two private firms and the falsified research, clearing him of fraud. Hwang, a former veterinary professor at Seoul National University, was touted as a global stem cell pioneer and a national hero in 2004 when he and his colleagues published a paper in Science claiming they had created the world’s first cloned human embryos and had extracted stem cells from them. Stem cells are the body’s master cells, the basis of all tissue, organs and blood. In another paper in 2005, he said his team had created human embryonic stem cells genetically matched to specific patients, an achievement that would pave the way to treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. But his fame crumbled when scientist bloggers began posting about the fabricated data they had uncovered. In 2006, the government stripped Hwang of his license to pursue stem-cell research.

pss@koreatimes.co.kr