An American magazine says the U.S. National Institutes of Health is investigating how a former partner of disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk spent 6.4 million dollars in NIH funds.

The Weekly Standard reported on January 6th that the NIH wants to know if part of the funds given to University of Pittsburgh professor Gerald Schatten was used to clone humans in violation of U.S. federal law.

Schatten's university has also launched an independent probe into the co-author of Hwang Woo-suk's theses published in 2004 and last year.

The magazine also said putting one's name as a thesis co-author without conducting the research as Schatten did is unprecedented among scientists, since one's signature is a scientist's personal guarantee of accuracy.