This is amazing. According to Digital Chosunilbo reports:

With one of the core members of Seoul National University professor Hwang Woo-suk’s research team stationed at the University of Pittsburgh disappearing, emergency alert has been initiated because of fears of a possible leak of stem cell technology.
With this alert, key members of Hwang’s team have abruptly left for the University of Pittsburgh, adding yet another level of tension to the saga.

Welcome to big bucks commercial stem cell research. The researchers from Korea are scrambling to make sure that one of the key participants in their major article in Science – the one in which they demonstrated that they could get embryonic stem cells from therapeutic cloning – does not “defect” to the U.S., taking with her the patentable knowledge she’s developed while working in Pittsburgh.

The backdrop for this is that she was working with Gerald Schatten, who blew the whistle on the purported violations of research ethics at Korea – or more specifically on what he said were lies by the Korean team about whether they had violated their own rules. And, to cap that, the Korean group is now claiming that Schatten, right before he blew said whistle, was demanding to chair the Hwang team’s World Stem Cell Bank program and to have a prominent share in the … intellectual property!

This whole thing is beginning to feel like a well-written episode of CSI, complete with the typical DNA angle.

More:

“For the last two weeks we have been unable to contact Park Eul-soon, one of the members of the team that was stationed at the University of Pittsburgh to work with Hwangs erstwhile collaborator Gerald Schatten there, an insider with the SNU team said. The whole atmosphere coming from the U.S. team is strange…

Park was originally supposed to return to Korea on Nov. 17 but for some reason gave the impression that she intended to remain in the U.S.,” the insider said. “We are looking into the situation. On the same day, SNU Prof. Ahn Cu-rie and Prof. Yoon Hyun-soo from Hanyang University caught a Korean Air flight to Chicago. The two professors are scheduled to fly on to Pittsburgh on Friday.

Park is a researcher who holds knowledge of key techniques for the removal of an egg cells nucleus and transferring the nucleus of somatic cell into the egg cell. The researcher made a key contribution to the extraction of a stem cell line from the world’s first cloned human embryo, the subject of a Hwang article in Science. The researcher was then dispatched to collaborate with Prof. Schatten’s research team at the University of Pittsburgh. Park also played a crucial role in generating cloned monkey embryos.

Here’s the deep throat part:

But it was the fact that Park donated her own ova for the 2003 project that was at the heart of the current scandal that led to Hwangs resignation from all official posts.

Now this is the big news. To the best of my knowledge her name had not been revealed until now. This means that Schatten has been working with the junior scientist who donated eggs – and has been doing so for some time. How long? It matters, obviously, in terms of the timing of the announcement by Schatten, and would be particularly odd if she had in fact made any donation in Korea during the time she was also in residence in Pittsburgh.