A team of investigators from the Seoul Central District Prosecutors Office looking into the Hwang Woo-suk debacle said yesterday that they could not find embryonic stem cells that Dr. Hwang’s team claimed to have cloned.
They said that two of the stem cell lines cited by the authors in a 2005 article published by the U.S. journal Science were from MizMedi Hospital.
The conclusions were based on DNA tests performed on 99 stem cell lines held by MizMedi Hospital. They agreed with the findings of Seoul National University’s investigating panel, which earlier had tested stem cell samples being stored at the university’s laboratories.
Prosecutors said they would now begin trying to find out who grew the stem cells they found and how they were mislabeled in the journal article.