Prosecutors yesterday summoned for questioning Park Eul-soon, a junior scientist on Hwang Woo-suk¡¯s stem cell team who earlier told media outlets she had been forced to donate ova for research purposes. The 29-year old had been dispatched to the University of Pittsburgh and returned on Wednesday.
¡°We will have to summon Ms. Park several times,¡± prosecutors said. Ms. Park was the fourth on a list of co-authors for a 2004 article on embryonic stem cell cloning that was published and later retracted by the U.S. journal Science. She is also known for her skill at what Dr. Hwang has called the ¡°chopstick technique¡± of transplanting somatic cell nuclei into unfertilized eggs.
Prosecutors also said they have succeeded in recovering deleted data from Kim Sun-jong¡¯s confiscated laptop computer. Mr. Kim¡¯s computer was seized when prosecutors raided his home on Dec. 24 but certain files were badly damaged. Prosecutors added that they will compare the file contents with those of lab notes written by Kwon Dae-gi, another suspect. Mr. Kwon was a researcher at the Seoul National University and the head of the stem cell research team.

by Hwang Se-hee, Moon Byung-joo for joongang Ilbo