A U.S.-based non-profit watchdog has urged the strengthening of regulations on theses with conflicting interests in the wake of cloning scientist Hwang Woo-suk’s scandal.

In a letter to the journals Science and Nature last week, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, or CSPI, said Hwang applied for various stem cell-related patent rights with the World Intellectual Property Organization, but did not mention the applications in his papers published in the journal Science in 2004 and 2005 and the one on the world’s first cloned dog, Snuppy, published in Nature.

In such cases, publishing of papers in journals should be banned for three years, the CSPI claimed.

The center pointed out Professor Gerald Schatten at the University of Pittsburgh also applied for patent rights related to Hwang’s papers with the U.S. authorities, but did not mention it.