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With Hwang's scientific credibility in shambles, the status of the world's most famous dog hangs in the balance. The embattled scientist maintains that Snuppy is the world's first canine clone, and he even hired an independent Korean DNA lab, HumanPass Inc., to verify that assertion. The verdict: HumanPass CEO Seung Jae Rhee told TIME last week, "There is no dispute about these results, and so I am 100% certain on Snuppy's authenticity." But since HumanPass is in essence working for Hwang, that's hardly good enough for the investigative panel at Seoul National University, which...
...also hot on the trail of something even bigger: a tip that Hwang's 2005 Science paper might contain fraudulent data. To verify the allegations, MBC requested samples of the stem cells, which Hwang provided. Pursuing their lead, the journalists tracked down two of three researchers from Hwang's lab who had gone to the University of Pittsburgh to work with his American collaborator and co-author, Dr. Gerald Schatten. They tried to strong-arm the Koreans into confirming the charges of data manipulation, and soon after, Schatten abruptly announced that he was terminating his partnership with Hwang, citing "information...
...appeared publicly to announce that he was retracting the suspect Science paper. MBC's request for samples had led him to do a retest, and to his surprise, he said, they were invalid. His theory: someone had switched the samples when they were at MizMedi to be photographed (his lab didn't have the right microphotography equipment) and stored. Later he accused Sun Jong Kim, one of the scientists cornered in Pittsburgh by MBC, of making the switch...
...happened is still a mystery. By all accounts, the tales of Hwang's dedication and personal discipline are all true. Hwang was one of the first to arrive in the lab, at 5 a.m., and rarely left before midnight. He rejected the role of aloof, inaccessible scientist to become a father-like figure for his young charges. And he introduced some genuine innovations into the science of cloning--gently squeezing the nucleus out of a donor egg rather than sucking it out violently and inserting the entire adult cell, not just its nucleus, into the hollowed-out recipient egg. Hwang...
That being the case, it seems unlikely that Hwang set out to perpetrate fraud. But it wouldn't be surprising if he, or someone in his lab, believed strongly enough in the work to be willing to cut corners. If that's true, the precipitating event could have come last January, when some of his stem-cell samples became contaminated, possibly by a fungus circulating in poorly shielded air vents...