Korean stem cell pioneer resigns

Passengers on an underground train watch a televised press conference in which Hwang Woo-suk, the Korean pioneer of stem cell research, announced his resignation from his post as professor of the college of veterinary medicine at Seoul National University. His decision came after a university panel investigating his work announced that he had faked the results in a landmark paper published online in Science last May (2005;308: 1777–83).

A team led by Professor Hwang claimed that it had produced patient specific embryonic stem cells derived from 11 human blastocysts, but the panel initially reported that in at least nine cases the results had been falsified and announced later that all 11 were false.

Credit: HAN SANG-KYUN/AP/EMPICS

The panel found that the stem cells had come from a fertilised egg produced at a Seoul hospital, not by Dr Hwang's team. Professor Hwang maintained that his team had developed the technology to create patient specific stem cells. The university panel has commissioned three outside institutions to verify Professor Hwang's work and is due to announce its full findings early in January.

Meanwhile the journal Science has said it will retract the paper.