By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 13, 2006
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.
Roh Sung Il, chairman of MizMedi Hospital, the fertility clinic where women donated eggs for Hwang's research, blamed "national pride" for the ethical breaches. He said Hwang's team had lied to the public about not paying donors for eggs -- Hwang had long claimed the ova were provided voluntarily by women supporting his work. Roh also acknowledged that at least two of Hwang's female researchers had been encouraged to donate.
For months after the allegations surfaced, Roh said, he lied to protect Hwang, claiming Hwang knew nothing about the researchers' egg donations or payments made to other women for their eggs. Roh said Hwang accompanied at least one of his female researchers when she underwent a procedure for egg donation.
Roh finally went public on Dec. 15, the day that he said Hwang informed him of far broader research falsifications that appeared to discredit the work. Roh had not spoken out earlier, when South Korea's Health Ministry continued to support Hwang, insisting the egg donations were in line with the country's legal and ethical standards. Internationally, however, the donations by female staff members were considered a violation of medical ethics, researchers said, because subordinates should not be persuaded or coerced to collaborate when it would put their health at risk.
"Look, Hwang was a national hero," Roh said. "If I held him responsible earlier, all the people in Korea would have blamed me, not him. I knew in my heart that I should tell the truth sooner, but I was afraid."
At a news conference Thursday, Hwang, 52, offered an apology to both the nation and the world for what, after weeks of denials, he finally admitted were "exaggerations" in his work. He also conceded that he had lied when he said he had not paid women for eggs for research. He also took responsibility for his team's flawed work.
Nevertheless, he defended portions of his work. The university panel, he noted, effectively backed up his assertions of having succeeded in creating cloned human embryos -- he said his team had cloned a total of 101. The panel also verified his claims of having produced Snuppy, the world's first cloned dog, last year, in addition to cloned cows and pigs.
Hwang said he failed in overseeing key data and by not keeping track of the number of eggs used in experiments. Estimates now are that Hwang's researchers used almost five times as many eggs as originally stated. Hwang blamed the lapses primarily on the team's unrelenting focus on its goal -- major breakthroughs.
"We were crazy, crazy about work," he told reporters on Thursday. "I was blinded. All I could see was whether I could make Korea stand in the center of the world through this research."
The recriminations did not stop with South Korea. Many here have expressed concern that the U.S. journal Science -- now in the process of retracting Hwang's major 2004 and 2005 studies and beefing up its standards -- allowed Hwang's claims to appear without stricter fact-checking.
But South Koreans are mostly blaming themselves. This week, the government announced it would no longer fund the World Stem Cell Hub, which had been coordinated by Hwang. President Roh's special adviser on science and technology, Park Ki Young, meanwhile, has resigned following allegations that government authorities might have been involved in a coverup. Hwang also tried to resign his post at Seoul National University, but the school has refused to accept it -- saying it plans a series of disciplinary hearings. The government has said it will launch an audit of national funds provided for Hwang's research.
Attempting to protect its drive for technological innovation, the university and the Ministry of Science and Technology said they were overhauling their ethics guidelines.
"We all should have been more skeptical from the beginning," said Park Sang Chul, a prominent biochemist at Seoul National University and a friend of Hwang's. "We all wanted to believe him, needed to believe him, because it made Korea great," Park continued. "Now he has betrayed us, and all we can do is retrace our steps, see where we erred and try to move on."
Researcher Vicky Kim contributed to this report.
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