| Gerald Schatten |
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In 2005, Gerald Schatten came to widespread media attention when he broke off his 20 month collaboration with Hwang Woo-suk , a Korean stem cell researcher. In an interview, Schatten commented that "my decision is grounded solely on concerns regarding oocyte (egg) donations in Dr. Hwang's research reported in 2004." This event led to a chain reaction of events, which has culminated in close scrutiny of the scientific validity of his joint work with Hwang. He has requested that the editors of '' Science '' remove his name from a joint paper he wrote with Hwang (and 23 other co-authors) in June 2005. While the journal normally requires requests from all the authors of a paper, the article will be retracted in any case, because of the situation. He had previously run afoul of controversy in the mid 1990s when it was found out that he had used eggs obtained illegally by University Of California researchers. Because the controversies surrounding his collaboration with Hwang Woo-Suk, Dr. Schatten was the subject of an investigation by his university, which was finished in February 2006. The investigation committee concluded that Gerald Schatten was not guilty of Scientific Misconduct because he had not known of the fraudulent data in their 2005 paper and because he reacted swiftly when he discovered the severe problems with the paper. The committee, however, thought it was troublesome that Dr. Schatten was not more familiar with the data in both the 2005 ''Science'' paper and the paper describing cloning of the dog Snuppy , of which he also was a co-author. In the first case, Dr. Schatten may have become suspucious of the data had he paid more attention and in the second case, his only contribution (according to himself) was the suggestion that a professional photographer be hired to photograph the cloned dog. Because Dr. Schatten apparently took significant credit (being a co-author on these high impact papers) for only small contribtions, the committee did accuse him of ''scientific misbehavior''. Whether or not Dr. Schatten will face any discplinary actions is up to the board of the University and is currently unknown. EXTERNAL LINKS
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