hankyoreh

South Korea's top university said Monday it has begun an investigation into suspicions that one of its research teams released erroneous statistics last month when it announced that it had cloned wolves for the first time in the world.

The team, led by Lee Byeong-chun and Shin Nam-sik, veterinary professors at Seoul National University (SNU), said it cloned two female wolves, named Snuwolf and Snuwolffy, in October 2005.

Lee was a key member of the team led by disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk, which produced the world's first cloned dog, Snuppy, in early 2005.

"Our Research Integrity Committee embarked on an investigation into the team's study on wolf cloning," Kuk Young, chief of the university's Office of Research Affairs, told reporters.

The school will take proper punishment measures if the suspicions are found to be true, he said.

Some biologists suspect the team manipulated statistics to inflate the success rate of its wolf cloning technology. They claimed the team might have intentionally mentioned a lower success rate in dog cloning to make its wolf cloning look more successful.

Others raised suspicions that Lee falsely arranged the numbers in a table for analyzing the mitochondrial DNA sequence of the cloned wolves and their surrogate mother dogs.

Lee admitted to the errors in his paper and vowed to ask the international science journal Cloning and Stem Cells, which published his paper in its March issue, to correct them. However, he denied allegations of making deliberate manipulations.

Hwang and Lee were put on trial following the discovery that their research papers on human stem cells contained fabricated data. Their work in dog cloning, however, was confirmed to be genuine and successful.

The university said, however, it did not shut down Lee's research room since sera samples from the blood of cloned wolves and dogs used in the cloning have been already secured.

"We apologize for failing to make a perfect system (to verify the integrity of papers written by SNU professors)," Kuk said. The university will make efforts to improve the verification system with help from scholars in each field of study, he added.

Seoul, April 9 (Yonhap News)