KAIST Suspends Star Bio-Scientist

By Cho Jin-seo

Staff Reporter

KAIST said Friday that it has indefinitely suspended bioscience professor Kim Tae-kook for the fabrication of data in two papers, which were published in renowned international journals and hailed as breakthrough research.

The university's investigative committee said it had looked into the matter over the past two weeks and found that Kim used bogus data in the two papers, published in Science and Nature Chemicalbiology in between 2005 and 2006.

It is the second time in three years that Science has been entangled with faulty papers written by Korean scientists. The magazine had to retract two papers written by Hwang Woo-suk in January 2006 after his stem-cell cloning research was found to have faked data.

Kim's 2006 paper suggested ideas for increasing the human lifespan by ``reprogramming'' cells ― the research earned him much publicity. South Korea's President Roh Moo-hyun invited him to the Blue House and KAIST President Suh Nam-pyo praised him as one of the most likely Korean candidates to win the Nobel Prize.

It was one of Kim's students who first suspected the credibility of Kim's research, the school said.

``A postgraduate student, who was a co-author of the paper, notified the school that he tried to replicate some of the experiments in the paper several times but couldn't,'' said Lee Gyun-min, professor and the department chief of Biological Sciences. ``We summoned other authors and found that there were false data analyses in the two papers. We also have strong evidence that these were deliberately done under Kim's supervision.''

Lee said the department will decide later whether they will fire Kim. The school could not reach Kim and he is believed to be staying in the United States, he said. Kim's office didn't answer phone calls on Friday afternoon and he didn't answer an e-mail by the evening.

Kim's studies were focused on molecular genomics and medicines. The first of the two controversial papers was ``A Magnetic Nanoprobe Technology for Detecting Molecular Interactions in Live Cells'' published in Science in July 2005; the second was ``Small Molecule-Based Reversible Reprogramming of Cellular Lifespan'' released in Nature Chemicalbiology in February 2006.

The department chief said that he has notified both journals about the problems. ``They will treat this issue according to their own standards and procedures,'' he said.

Kim had had a bitter history with the school. They have been in a feud over the ownership of some biomedicine patents. Kim had been suspended for six months up to January for violating the school's patent registration regulations.

Kim graduated from Seoul National University in 1987. He earned a masters degree from the same school and a Ph.D from the Rockefeller University in New York.

indizio@koreatimes.co.kr