Baker's Dozen

Guardian reports that Hwang's new nemisis-apparent and despairing co-author, Roh Sung-il, the chairman of the board at Seoul's Mizmedi hospital, is throwing further fuel on the fire of fraud accusations against Dr. Hwang. You can tell whose side the Guardian is on by the fact that they've jumped on the bandwagon of referring derisively to Hwang as "a trained veterinarian."

It is not at all obvious how to interpret Roh's claim, and it should be noted that Dr. Hwang called for criminal charges to be brought against Roh in a press conference just three days ago, after he and Roh held dueling press conferences to discuss who lied the most in the production and submission and even in the subsequent retraction request for their scientific paper. Roh

said the hospital provided more than 900 eggs from 65 people for a paper Prof Hwang published in the journal Science this year.

The professor, however, claimed in the article that he used just 185 human eggs to create custom-made embryonic stem cells for 11 patients, winning international acclaim for his cloning efficiency. In a paper published a year ago, Prof Hwang said it took 242 eggs to grow just one batch of stem cells. "It is not clear how some 700 eggs, besides the 185, were used," Dr Roh was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency.

Dr Roh has previously claimed that Prof Hwang faked at least nine of the 11 stem cell lines. Prof Hwang, a trained veterinarian, said last week he had asked Science to withdraw the May article after admitting that at the time of publication his team had only created eight stem cell lines.