An investigative panel at Seoul National University (SNU) has concluded that Hwang Woo-suk’s 2004 paper published in Science was indeed fabricated.

In a much anticipated news conference Tuesday, the panel chief, Professor Jung Myung Hee, disclosed investigators' final findings, which confirmed that Hwang had faked photos and data in the 2004 thesis as he had done in the 2005 thesis. The panel clarified its belief that the embryonic stem cells reported in his 2004 paper had not been created by transfer of a nucleus from a patient’s somatic cell.

The panel’s finding makes it difficult to recognize the authenticity of the core stem cell technology that Hwang has consistently claimed to possess.

But the panel also officially confirmed that Hwang’s cloned dog Snuppy had indeed been created from the somatic cell of the parent dog, Tie.

The commission said even though Hwang’s research team had reached the blastocyst stage in its stem cell experiments, the feat in itself could not easily be regarded as proprietary technology.

The team was also found to have used two-thousand-61 eggs from one-hundred-29 patients over a three-year period from November 2002.