Hwang Woo-suk Involved in More Korean Scientific Fraud?

The New York Times had nice overview article about the whole stem cell controversy involving Dr. Hwang Woo-suk. A couple of things in the article did jump out at me. First of all how much did the Roh Administration know about the forgery before the MBC report?:

An indication of Dr. Hwang’s good connections to the government was the inclusion of Dr. Park Ky Young as a co-author of his 2004 report on human cloning. A botanist by training, Dr. Park may not have contributed much scientifically to the task of cloning of human cells. She is, however, the science adviser to Roh Moo Hyun, the president of South Korea.

Did Dr. Park know what was going on and maybe this is why the government was trying so vigorously to discredit the MBC report?

Here is the other thing I found interesting:

“Clearly the scientific credibility of Korean investigators has been compromised,” said Dr. John Gearhart, a stem cell expert at Johns Hopkins University and a member of Science’s board of reviewers. He referred to the fact that duplicate and misidentified photos had turned up in articles by other South Korean authors besides Dr. Hwang.

This just makes me curious about what other cases of scientific fraud has been published by Korean scientists. Is this a systematic problem in Korea or are Korean cases of scientific fraud similar to the amount of fraud cases in western countries?

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16 years ago

South Korea: Adoption, Abortion, and Dog Meat…

Koreans are generally more sensitive than other nationalities to outside (i.e., international) criticism or scrutiny and obsessed with their “place” in world rankings. So these three articles caught my attention; a series on a movement to stop fore…

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16 years ago

[…] Koreans are generally more sensitive than other nationalities to outside (i.e., international) criticism or scrutiny and obsessed with their “place” in world rankings. So these three articles caught my attention; a series on a movement to stop foreign adoption, misleading abortion statistics, and the praises of dog meat, all of which can be seen as nationalistic reactions to less than favorable international attitudes about Korea in those areas. I won’t delve into the well-covered areas of fan death or the infamous Dr. Hwang. […]

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