Patent fight over dog cloning keeps disgraced scientist busy

Darkfrog submitted, created time 6 months 1 day (www.nature.com)

It turns out that Woo Suk Hwang, formerly of Seoul National University before they booted him out for falsifying his research, is involved in a lawsuit with one of his former teammates, Byeong Chun Lee, or at least the preliminary pangs of a lawsuit.

Hwang is invovled with a U.S. company and Lee with a Korean one. The U.S. company has just told the Korean one to stop cloning dogs. In June, Lee's company managed to make four clones of a dog that can sniff out cancer in humans--so this technology does have more than sentimental application

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Next steps in human cloning: cloned blastocysts

Darkfrog submitted, created time 11 months 3 weeks (www.nature.com)

A team in California claims to have performed in truth what disgraced Seoul U. researcher Woo Suk Hwang had faked: Stegeman company of La Jolla CA claims the creation of a cloned blastocyst from which a tailored cell line can be made. They started with an adult patient's own cells, in this case, a man's fibroblasts.

The article doesn't explicitly say, but since this is a blastocyst, I am assuming that it went through a totipotent state. The pro-life crowd would consider this morally objectionable

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Disgraced cloner Woo Suk Hwang attempts a comeback

jane2007 submitted, created time 1 year 2 weeks (www.nature.com)

In January 2006, Woo Suk Hwang’s apparent breakthrough articles announcing the first cloned human embryonic stem cells were shown to be fabrications. It was the biggest scientific scandal in recent history, and one might have thought his scientific career was over.But on 17 December an official said that Hwang had applied for a new licence for this type of work. Work continues to be published under Hwang's name.The Korean science ministry is expected to make a decision on the application by April 2008.

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