Koreans 'Blinded' to Truth About Claims on Stem Cells

SEOUL, Jan. 12 -- When South Korean investigative television reporters late last year exposed massive fraud and ethical breaches by Hwang Woo Suk, the now-disgraced cloning scientist, virtually nobody believed them.

Furious viewers demonstrated against their program, "PD Notebook," and clogged its computers with e-mails. The show's producer received death threats. President Roh Moo Hyun declared that the allegations against Hwang, who had been given the official title of "supreme scientist," were "ridiculous."

"The Korean people were blinded against the truth all along," said Han Hak Soo, the producer and director of "PD Notebook." "Hwang was not just a successful scientist, he had become a Jesus figure, someone who said he could make the crippled walk again. He was going to make Korea the center of a new major industry in stem cell research and biotechnology. How could any good Korean dare question him?"

Faced with overwhelming evidence, Hwang apologized Thursday on national television for having published false research. An academic panel at Seoul National University this week discredited Hwang's claims in 2004 and 2005 that his research team had harvested stem cells from cloned human embryos. Such a process could lead to new treatments for currently incurable diseases.

Hwang's deception ranks as one of the highest-profile cases of scientific fraud in recent history. The public prosecutor's office, which has opened an investigation, seized documents Thursday from Hwang and 11 of his colleagues.

Other researchers have been working on the process and hope soon to succeed in producing stem cells from cloned human embryos. But the issue of human cloning has generated a substantial ethical debate in the United States and elsewhere.

Here in South Korea, Hwang's case has provoked soul-searching about national values, which often focus on success and quick results, sometimes at the expense of ethical standards.

"Our society has been overwhelmed with the principle of focusing on outcome instead of procedure, and we forgot that ends cannot justify the means," Chung Un Chan, president of Seoul National University, where most of Hwang's work was conducted, said in an apology to the nation Wednesday. "Most of us, in the name of national interests, exaggerated Dr. Hwang's research to make it an aspiration of the nation."

Over the past four decades, South Korea has grown into the world's 11th-largest economy, while becoming known for its unparalleled respect for higher education. With the government supporting innovation in high-tech industries, South Korea has become a leading player in the fields of semiconductors, automobile manufacturing and shipbuilding.

Seeking also to promote its international position in biotechnology research, the government delivered $30 million of funding to Hwang's team with few strings attached, leading academics here said. Last October, the government launched the World Stem Cell Hub, headed by Hwang and intended to make South Korea a center for the medical cloning industry.

The drive to succeed was so strong that many top academics and government officials concede they ignored a series of warning signs. The British journal Nature, for example, starting in May 2004 repeatedly raised questions about the ethical standards of Hwang's work. Last July, detailed charges of exaggerations and ethical breaches by Hwang's team were posted on a scientific Web site. Last fall, a group of young scientists demanded an inquiry into Hwang's work at Seoul National University, South Korea's leading institution of higher education.

The university was prodded into launching an official investigation on Dec. 11, three weeks after the first exposé of Hwang by "PD Notebook" and one week after a scientific Web site posted the doctored photos that had been used to substantiate Hwang's work.