Well, he made it up. All of it, apparently. According to a report published on December 29

th by Seoul National University in South Korea, its erstwhile employee Hwang Woo-suk, who had tendered his resignation six days earlier, deliberately falsified his data in the paper on human embryonic stem cells that he and 24 colleagues published in Science in May 2005.

In particular, Dr Hwang claimed he had created 11 colonies of human embryonic stem ceils genetically matched to specific patients. He had already admitted that nine of these were bogus, but had said that this was the result of an honest mistake, and that the other two were still the real McCoy. A panel of experts appointed by the university to investigate the matter, however, disagreed. They found that DNA fingerprint traces conducted on the stem-cell lines reported in the paper had been manipulated to make it seem as if all 11 lines were tailored to specific patients. In fact, none of them matched the volunteers with spinal-cord injuries and diabetes who had donated skin cells for the work. To obtain his promising "results", Dr Hwang had sent for testing two samples from each donor, rather than a sample from the donor and a sample of the cells into which the donor's DNA had supposedly been transplanted.

The panel also found that a second claim in the paper — that only 185 eggs were used to create the 11 stem cell lines — was false. The investigators said the actual number of eggs used was far larger, in the thousands, although they were unable to determine an exact figure. The reason this double fraud is such a blow is that human embryonic stem-cell research has great expectations. Stem cells, which have not yet been programmed to specialise and can thus, in principle, grow into any tissue or organ, could be used to treat illnesses ranging from diabetes to Parkinson's disease. They might even be able to fix spinal-cord injuries. And stem cells cloned from a patient would not be rejected as foreign by his immune system.

Dr Hwang's reputation, of course, is in tatters. The university is now investigating two other groundbreaking experiments he claims to have conducted — the creation of the world's first cloned human embryo and the extraction of stem cells from it, and the creation of the world's first cloned dog. He is also in trouble for breaching ethical guidelines by using eggs donated by members of his research team.

And it is even possible that the whole farce may have been for nothing. Cloned embryos might be the ideal source of stem cells intended to treat disease, but if it proves too difficult to create them, a rough-and-ready alternative may suffice.

From the passage we may learn that Hwang Woo-suk ______.

A．made up all his experience

B．is a famous geneticists in Seoul National University

C．was an employee in Seoul National University

D．published an authentic paper in Science with his 24 colleagues