Timeline of Events in the Korean Research Scandal

Nature released in its December 22, 2005 issue a timeline of events in the scandal involving South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang, who not only exhibited questionable ethics by using eggs from a junior female lab member, but faked his headline-making cloning experiments. The harvesting of eggs from a junior lab member was supposedly uncoerced, but there is a high likelihood that there was pressure of one form or another in this high stakes game of big-money research. As they say, where there's smoke, there's fire. The South Korean media reported the source of the eggs on November 21, and less than a month later, on December 13, reports surfaced that Hwang and his team had faked data from their 2005 Science paper, in which Hwang's group claimed to have established 11 embryonic stem-cell lines from the skin cells of individuals. In a related article in the same issue of Nature (see Where now for stem-cell cloners? (subscription required)), scientists say that "complete loss of confidence in Hwang's work has set the field back by years. It has also taken away what seemed to be firm confirmation of the feasibility of using cloning to produce patient-matched stem cells."