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Investigators said Kang Sung-keun, a top lieutenant of the country's disgraced cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk, claimed Schatten knew about the cell contamination accident before authoring the article on patient-specific stem cells featured by Science last year.
Hwang's team has contended that six patient-specific cell batches, now all discredited, were destroyed by germs in Jan. 2005 and they failed to recover four of them.
``I heard Schatten suggest to Hwang that it would be okay to feature the four dead stem cells due to contamination in the Science article because they were really established,'' Kang was quoted as saying by prosecutors.
If true, this means Schatten played a role in cooking data for the acclaimed paper, in contradiction to a recent report claiming that Schatten is a victim of the Seoul team-led frauds, not an accomplice.
Earlier last week, a Pitt investigative panel vindicated Schatten, concluding that the biologist did not...