Seoul: Defence of fake "cloning pioneer" starts today
Hwang Woo-suk is on trial for misappropriation of state and private funds and of violating the national bioethics law. The line of defence has not been revealed as yet. If found guilty, he faces up to three years in prison.
Seoul (AsiaNews/Agencies) The defence of the disgraced "cloning pioneer", South Korean vet Hwang Woo-suk, starts today. He stands accused of violating national bioethics law and of embezzling his project donors, both private and state organs.
Since the start of legal proceedings, Hwang has maintained that he is "innocent", a victim of "underlings who deceived him". It is not immediately clear what the defence of his lawyers will be.
The vet, who was once a "national hero", fell into disgrace after the international scientific community and the capital's university revealed that results of his research on embryonic stem cells were fabricated in the laboratory to give the impression that he had managed to clone healthy cells from sick people stricken by diseases for which no cure is currently available.
Hwang used to be considered one of the foremost scientists in the world in the genetic field. The results of his research were published in 2004 and 2005 in two issues of the major US scientific journal Science in which the researcher claimed he had created stem cell lines with the cloning of human embryos.
However, Science withdrew both articles after the Seoul National University (SNU) revealed his studies were faked and stem cells had not been created genetically but had come from donor eggs.
Since May, Hwang has been on trial for misappropriation of state and private funds worth an estimated 2.8 billion won (around 2.5 million euros) and for buying the eggs needed for his experiments, a practice forbidden by the country's bioethics law. Consequently, the government withdrew the researcher's license. If guilty, he faces up to three years in jail.
During the initial hearings, the veterinarian admitted that he had ordered his assistants to falsify the results of the early experiments to give the impression that they were working, but he said he was "always convinced" that the main research would work.
Hwang has now gone back at work in a private lab opened by the Suam biotechnological research, which focuses on transplants of the organs of different species.
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