With a nuclear-armed maniac rattling his missiles only a few miles away, South Koreans are no longer as focused on their stem cell debacle as they were a few months ago. But disgraced researcher Hwang Woo-suk has been in court this month e of the sad story of faked human clones and browbeaten egg donors. Hwang still insists that researchers at his lab deceived him.

As for the US$2 million that appear to have disappeared, he has some intriguing explanations. “Some of the money was spent in contacting the Russian mafia as we tried to clone mammoths,” he told the court. But you can’t say that [on the books], so we expensed it as money for cows for experiments.” There is some confusion about what Hwang actually meant. say that he had to pay “travel taxes” to Russian gangsters on his quest for mammoth cells.

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Michael Cook

Michael Cook edits BioEdge, a bioethics newsletter, and MercatorNet, an on-line magazine whose focus is human dignity. He writes from Sydney, Australia.

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