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Disgraced cloning scientist indicted
South Korea’s disgraced cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk was last week charged with fraud, embezzlement and violating bioethics laws with his now-discredited stem cell research.
State prosecutors have been investigating Dr Hwang since January after the university where he once worked said his team deliberately fabricated key data in two research papers.
The world’s scientific community was shocked by revelations that his groundbreaking work — such as producing stem cell lines from cloned human embryos — had been found to be fake.
The formal indictments are a new low for Dr Hwang, who was once a national hero in South Korea. Among the charges were allegations he used millions of pounds in research grants for private purposes.
However, prosecutors said they did accept one key argument Dr Hwang used in his defence, that some of his claims were due to a junior researcher deceiving him into believing his lab successfully created patient-specific stem cells from cloned embryos.
The prosecutors added, however, that Dr Hwang compounded this alleged fraud by fabricating further research. Senior prosecution official Lee In-kyu announced the indictments of Dr Hwang and five members of his research team during a nationally televised news conference.
Mr Lee said prosecutors had decided not to take any of them into custody at this stage, although he did not elaborate on the reasons for this. Dr Hwang was fired in March from his post as a professor at Seoul National University’s veterinary department after admitting he fabricated data for two papers published in academic journals in 2004 and 2005.
The four-year Ministry of Defence study, codenamed Project Condign, found that UFO sightings are the result of rare atmospheric conditions. It used information from more than 10,000 eyewitness reports, many from military personnel.
The report, which is nearly 500 pages long, was released under a Freedom of Information Act request by David Clarke, a social scientist at Sheffield Hallam University, and his colleague Gary Anthony. Dr Clarke estimates that the report, with a mysterious unnamed author, cost around £100,000 to produce. He questioned why the MoD kept the project under wraps.
“Why the secrecy? This report clears up many of the rumours surrounding UFOs and there is no reason it couldn’t have been made public earlier,” he said.
An MoD spokesperson denied a cover-up, saying the report came to the same conclusion as the “Flying Saucer Working Party”, a group of scientists and military personnel who briefed government on the phenomena in 1952.
Scientists originally thought the monkey, named Rungwecebus kipunji after Mount Rungwe in Tanzania, was a type of mangabey from the genus Lophocebus. However, a more detailed genetic analysis of the animal showed its close connection to baboons.
William Stanley, of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, wrote in the journal Science: “This is exciting news because it shows that the age of discovery is by no means over.”
Rungwecebus kipunji is mainly covered in light greyish-brown fur with an off-white patch on its belly and at the end of its curled tail. It also has a crown of long, erect hair. It communicates by making loud, low-pitched honks and eats fruit, leaves, shoots and insects.
When it was first spotted in 2005, experts based their classification of the monkey on photographs alone. But soon afterwards a specimen died in a farmer’s trap.
Scientists therefore got a chance to study the animal more closely, including taking muscle tissue samples to extract DNA. To study family links with other primates, they looked at the animal’s mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to child, and the Y-chromosome, which is passed from father to son.
The analysis revealed that the kipunji is more closely related to baboons in the genus Papio, rather than the Lophocebus to which it was originally assigned. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
The proposed crime-control strategy, already in growing use in Britain, is based on two central facts: Close relatives of criminals are more likely than others to break the law, research has shown, and, because those individuals are related, their DNA “fingerprints” will be similar. That suggests that if police find a crime-scene specimen with a DNA pattern close to — but not exactly the same as — that of a known lawbreaker, a relative of that known criminal may be the culprit.
In Britain, where rules governing the use of DNA for fighting crime are more permissive than in most US states, the approach has been used dozens of times and has helped solve several cases, said Frederick R. Bieber, a Harvard medical geneticist who led the new study with colleague David Lazer and Charles H. Brenner of the University of California at Berkeley.
In one recent case, for example, a specimen from a 1988 murder scene was found to have a DNA pattern similar to that of a 14-year-old boy whose DNA was on file with the police. Investigators obtained a sample from the teenager’s uncle, which perfectly matched the crime scene specimen and led to his conviction.
The new analysis is the first to use sophisticated computer models to predict just how useful such “familial” searches may be. — Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Washington Post
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