Would cloning and bringing back to life a mammoth that is believed to have gone extinct several thousand years ago be enough for a defamed scientist who left an indelible stain on scientific academia to make a comeback? Some of Hwang Woo-suk’s supporters certainly hope so.
At the event, Gov. Kim said, “I asked Dr. Hwang the other day if he could clone a dinosaur. He said it’s impossible because there were no remains of a dinosaur from which he could extract somatic cell. “I asked him, then, if a mammoth can be cloned. Dr. Hwang said there is a possibility because there are remains of a mammoth still in Siberia,” he said, adding, “Dr. Hwang turned a fairy tale into reality today. I hope him to succeed in his greater challenge in the future.”
Mr. Hwang didn’t seem to have any immediate plans to clone a mammoth, but he is working next on cloning a Lycaon, also known as the African wild dog.
In 2009, the former Seoul National University professor was convicted of embezzlement and of falsifying his 2004 paper, which was later retracted by the journal Science. He was given a two-year suspended prison term. After the conviction, Mr. Hwang more or less disappeared from the public scene, but that didn’t mean he stopped researching. Since the government had banned him from engaging in any kind of human embryonic stem-cell research, he set up a private research institute – the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation — in Gyeonggi province to focus on cloning animals.
And in that area, Mr. Hwang has been thriving. In 2005, he created Snuppy, the world’s first cloned dog. His team also succeeded in cloning several more animals, including a pig, a wolf, and now — coyotes. His supporters have sporadically called on the government to renew his license in human embryonic stem-cell research, but it seems likely that Mr. Hwang’s past will overshadow any of his future research.
