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Nature 438, 1056-1057 (22 December 2005) | doi:10.1038/4381056a; Published online 21 December 2005

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Special Report Korean scandal will have global fallout

Erika Check & David Cyranoski

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The possibility that Woo Suk Hwang's cloning experiments were faked threatens to undermine confidence in stem-cell research.

In one of the biggest scientific scandals of recent times, South Korea's star cloner Woo Suk Hwang last week asked to retract his landmark paper on the creation of embryonic stem cells from adult human tissue. The request, along with new doubts about his earlier work, confirms what researchers in the field were already starting to realize — that the advance marked by Hwang's research, with all it promised for therapeutic cloning, may amount to nothing.