Korean wolf cloning study pulled

The editor and publisher of the journal Cloning and Stem Cells have removed from their Web site a paper by a South Korean research team published this spring announcing the first cloning of gray wolves, after the authors said they would like to make changes to the text.

The nature of the changes has not been publicly released.

The research team was once led by Woo-Suk Hwang, who admitted to fabricating his research on human embryonic stem cells. Seoul National University (SNU), where the research was conducted, has launched an investigation into the wolf cloning project. Hwang was involved with this research and is listed as an author on the paper, though he resigned from SNU in December 2005, after a university panel announced his culpability in manipulating results involving human embryonic stem cells.

Instead of the full text of the paper, the journal's Web site now shows a message reading, in part, that the authors "have requested corrections to the text. In addition, the Office of Research Affairs at Seoul National University has initiated an investigation into the research."

"The journal will await the outcome of this investigation before deciding upon any action," Donna Lumsden, the editorial coordinator at Cloning and Stem Cells, said in an Email to The Scientist. "No other comments will be made until then."

In the paper, the Korean team reports that it cultured fibroblasts from the ear of a female adult gray wolf, then fused these donor cells to enucleated domestic dog oocytes. Twenty three days later, the researchers detected two pregnancies out of the 251 reconstructed intragenic embryos transferred to twelve surrogate mother dogs. Two wolves, Snuwolf and Snuwolffy, were born in October 2005. As evidence for a successful cloning, the authors presented the results of a microsatellite analysis and a mitochondrial DNA analysis, both seeming to confirm their claim.

Yesterday (April 11), The Korea Times said the group is facing allegations that they "intentionally used erroneous data to inflate their claims." The paper also reported that the team is suspected of "incorrectly arranging numbers in a table analyzing the mitochondrial DNA sequence of the cloned wolves and their surrogate mother dogs and of failing to acknowledge previous research on wolf cloning."

Neither the authors of the paper nor SNU officials responded to requests for comment.

"No peer reviewed journal would [remove a paper from its Web site] unless there was a major concern," Robert Lanza, medical director at Advanced Cell Technology, told The Scientist. "This is not done lightly." Lanza, who was not involved in the Korean study but whose own paper on a cloning technique was highly scrutinized last August, said that even minor statistical errors could cast doubt on the entire study. "Anything that was fraudulent calls the whole paper into question," he said.

In 2005, the wolf cloning team, then led by Hwang, announced the successful cloning of a dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy. That result has since been independently verified.

SNU has supplied blood and cell samples both from the cloned wolves and from the domestic dogs used in the research to independent laboratories for verification of the cloning success. According to the story in The Korea Times, results from these tests are expected later this month.

Lanza said that this independent verification is crucial. "Considering there is a spotted history, it would behoove the scientific community to verify the validity of this paper," he said, adding that problems like the ones plaguing the Korean team, "unfortunately impact the broader scientific community and" the overall credibility of stem cell researchers.

Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Cloning and Stem Cells editorial board, agreed with Lanza, saying that even if the Korean team's cloning results are validated, the allegations deal a severe blow to stem cell and cloning science. "It casts a shadow," Caplan told The Scientist, "Like it or not, it does."

Bob Grant
mail@the-scientist.com

Links within this article:

Cloning and Stem Cells
'http://www.liebertpub.com/publication.aspx?pub_id=9

MK Kim et al, "Endangered wolves cloned from adult somatic cells," Cloning Stem Cells, Spring 2007.
http://www.the-scientist.com/pubmed/17386020

A. McCook, "Hwang faked results, says panel," The Scientist, December 2005.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22870

Paper Removal Message
http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/clo.2006.0034

"Paper on wolf cloning removed from web site," The Korea Times, April 11, 2007.
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/tech/200704/kt2007041121032012350.htm

B. Maher, "The embryo corrections," The Scientist, August 25, 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/24413

I. Oransky, "First dog cloned," The Scientist, August 3, 2005.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22746/

I. Oransky, "All Hwang human cloning work fraudulent," The Scientist, January 10, 2006.
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/22933

I. Oransky, "Nature got lucky, and so did I," The Scientist, January 10, 2007.
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/22934/