South Korea

The panel at Seoul National University (S.N.U.) put it bluntly: "This kind of error is a grave act that damages the foundations of science." Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, South Korea's famous stem-cell researcher, had fallen from grace. An S.N.U. investigation into Hwang's groundbreaking experiments in human cloning found the nation's top scientist had faked the results of his greatest success. The scandal was a setback not only for the controversial field of embryonic-stem-cell research, but also for the image of scientists as disinterested practitioners pursuing knowledge and truth.

Hwang's fraudinvestigators ruled that his claims to have cloned human...