Posted for David Cyranoski

Korean newspapers are reporting that Woo Suk Hwang and his research group are trying to get back in the big leagues by doing in pigs what he had once claimed to do in humans.

The once-famed cloner and now famed fraudster has been running the Sooam Biotech Research Centre, funded with private money, outside of Seoul for a couple years now.

On 15 May, Hyun Sang-hwan, identified as “Hwang’s key colleague” told the Korea Times that they had succeeded in creating a cloned pig embryo, extracting stem cells from it, and establishing lines of self-reproducing cloned cells from them.

Hwang had claimed to do that same trick in humans in papers in Science in 2004 and 2005. The potential of that technology for biomedical research and medical therapy captivated the world. Sadly in 2006 it turned out to be all bunk.

Hyun’s quotations carry an accusation aimed at Hwang’s past collaborators and a defence of Hwang. In the past “he was involved until the process of creating cloned blastocysts” and had other researchers extract the stem cells.

Read between the lines: Hwang did his part of the job. This time around, “Hwang was involved in the whole process from start to finish. He was determined to quieten any doubts about his skills and knowledge as a scientist.”

Hyun says the paper will be published in Zygote in “two or three months” time.

Hyun however seems to be treading a path well worn by Hwang in the years before his Science papers–discussing research far before publication. Hyun also claimed that the group “has so far produced 14 papers on various cloning studies, some of them currently under review for publication in peer-review journals such as Nature”.

That sounds good. But there’s no way for anyone to check whether they have actually submitted anything to any journal. It’s also impossible to tell, assuming they have submitted papers to Nature and elsewhere, whether those journals are seriously considering them or, perhaps, immediately rejected them with a polite note of thanks.

[Editor’s note: Information about papers submitted to Nature is strictly confidential to the scientific editors handling them, and is not shared with other Nature editorial staff.]