SEOUL, May 12 — Hwang Woo Suk, the disgraced cloning expert, was indicted on fraud and embezzlement charges today, months after an investigative panel determined that he had fabricated evidence to prove that he had cloned human cells.
Hwang Woo-suk's supporters rallied today outside the prosecutor's office in Seoul.
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A supporter of Hwang Woo-Suk demonstrated today outside the prosecutor's office in Seoul.
Prosecutors blamed the scandal, one of the most notorious cases of science fraud in recent years, on a combination of elements: a junior scientist who fabricated lab tests to please his boss, and Mr. Hwang himself, a charismatic head researcher who was blind to the scam but also ordered more fabrications to speed up the publication of his papers.
Junior researchers knew about the alleged wrongdoing but could not challenge Mr. Hwang, said a prosecutor, Lee In Kyu, during a nationally televised news conference. Five of Mr. Hwang's associates were also indicted.
Reconfirming the earlier findings by Hwang's school, Seoul National University, Mr. Lee said that Hwang had never cloned embryonic stem cells from patients. Mr. Hwang's now-discredited claim had raised hopes that doctors one day would grow genetically matching tissues from embryonic stem cells to repair damaged organs or treat diseases like Alzheimer's.
The prosecutors, however, failed to clarify what role South Korean government officials had played in the dramatic rise of Mr. Hwang as a national hero and as the government's first "supreme scientist," a title created for him that granted him millions of dollars in research funds. Critics called for a parliamentary investigation.
"Prosecutors spent all those months in investigation, and yet they don't say anything about how much the government was involved and responsible," said Song Sang Yong, chairman of the Asia Bioethics Association. From President Roh Moo Hyun to his science minister and aides, the government has fervently supported Hwang.
Mr. Hwang was charged with fraud for accepting 2 billion won, or $2.1 million, in private donations based on his falsified research. He also was accused of embezzling at least 800 million won out of the estimated 37 billion won he had received in government and private research funds.
Mr. Hwang used part of the money to make donations to politicians, the prosecutor said. He was also charged with using part of the funds to buy human eggs for his research in violation of the country's bioethics law.
If convicted, Mr. Hwang could serve up to 10 years in jail.
The scandal raised doubt about the feasibility and ethics of one of science's most cutting-edge research fields: cloning human embryos and then destroying them to extract stem cells.
Lessons from the cloning scandal will become a major topic at conferences by the World Congress of Bioethics, the Society for Social Studies of Science, and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology later this year, Song said. Unesco is working to revise and strengthen its 30-year-old code of conduct for scientists.
By raising false expectations, Mr. Hwang "indelibly hurt the people as well as the families and patients of hard-to-cure diseases," Mr. Lee said. "Some scientists abused the people's high expectations and a lack of peer reviews and disregarded ethics of research to attain their own goals."
Mr. Hwang and the five associates indicted today on similar charges were not arrested.
About 300 supporters of Mr. Hwang staged an overnight candlelit vigil in front of the prosecutor's office, accusing them of conducting a witch hunt and demanding that Mr. Hwang be reinstated to continue his research. When the results were announced, some wept or smashed their cell phones on the pavement in anger.
Calls to Mr. Hwang were not returned, but his lawyer, Mun Hyong Sik, told local reporters that Mr. Hwang will dispute the charges. Mr. Hwang has earlier said that he was the victim of a conspiracy to discredit him.
No one in recent years has galvanized South Korea's national pride as Mr. Hwang did. In a paper published in the periodical Science in 2004, his team said it had cloned the first human embryo and extracted stem cells from it. In a technology called "nuclear transfer," Mr. Hwang transplanted a woman's DNA into her egg to clone an embryo. In 2005, Mr. Hwang's team published another paper in Science saying that it repeated the procedure with DNA from patients' body cells and the eggs of unrelated donors.
Mr. Hwang's fame began crumbling last year when news media and scientists began scrutinizing his papers and found evidence of fabrication. Science retracted both his papers.
According to prosecutors, it was unclear whether the stem cell line Mr. Hwang said his team created in its 2004 paper was produced by embryonic cloning or was just a human egg induced to develop by parthenogenesis, a process that does not involve cloning and is known as virgin birth because no sperm is used.
But Mr. Hwang's lab lost the cell colony during a test. Hwang nonetheless ordered the fabricating of DNA data and cell photographs and published his landmark 2004 paper, prosecutors said.
