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Washington (dpa) - The journal Science said Tuesday it would retract two falsified research papers by South Korean cloning pioneer Hwang Woo Suk on human stem-cells.
In a statement posted on the journal's website, editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy said the publication was doing a "systematic review of the editorial history of both papers and our procedures for evaluating them, to search for ways in which we might improve those".
Kennedy said that the journal was calling on "outside experts" to provide additional procedural safeguards, which could include requiring all authors to detail their specific contributions to the research submitted and signing "statements of concurrence" with their conclusions.
Science published the Hwang group's papers in 2004 and 2005.
"Fraud is unlikely to be eliminated completely through the process of scientific publishing, and truth in science ultimately depends upon confirmation," Kennedy said. "But at Science, we are determined to do everything in our power to evaluate our own procedures for detecting research misconduct, and we will communicate the results of this effort to the scientific community when it is complete."
Earlier Tuesday, after a month-long investigation, a Seoul National University investigative panel found that Hwang's team could not prove that it had ever cloned customized stem cells for patients or human embryonic stem-cell lines.
The panel said that Hwang had faked stem cells submitted to Science magazine for a 2004 paper, in which he claimed to have achieved the first and so far only therapeutic cloning of a human embryo.
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
