Two Papers From Korean Lab Found to Lack 'Scientific Truth'

Jennifer Couzin and Dennis Normile

An investigation by a prominent South Korean university has revealed that two papers by its researchers "do not contain any scientific truth." Both will likely be retracted by the journals in which they appeared, Science and Nature Chemical Biology. The papers describe a new way to identify drug targets by tracking protein movements in living cells. Their well-known senior author, Tae Kook Kim, studied in the United States and founded a company in Daejeon, South Korea, in 2004 to commercialize the findings.

Kim, in a brief e-mail to a Science reporter, said he would cooperate with the investigation "to open the truth very soon." He added that a "certain party has twisted this current situation to take an advantage of it."

An inquiry by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, where Kim is a faculty member, is not yet complete. But Gyun Min Lee, chair of KAIST's Department of Biological Sciences and head of the internal investigation committee, informed Science by e-mail that "our initial investigative results are strong enough to convince us that the two papers do not contain any scientific truth." Another member of the committee, Yeon-Soo Seo, a biochemist at KAIST, declines to say precisely what it has found until the investigation is complete.

KAIST launched the inquiry after scientists at Kim's company, CGK Co., had difficulty coaxing the technology, called magnetism- based interaction capture (MAGIC), to work. One co-author of both papers and a former Ph.D. student in Kim's lab, Yong-Weon Yi, contacted Science and Nature Chemical Biology in December to ask that his name be removed from the papers. The journals then quietly began asking questions of their own. Science was reassured by Kim that "he didn't think there were problems with the paper," says Katrina Kelner, Science's deputy editor for biological sciences. The journals' inquiries were continuing when KAIST announced its preliminary findings on 29 February.

Too good to be true? Papers describing a technique known as MAGIC for tracking proteins in a living cell have been called into question.

At CGK, which raised $2.5 million from three Korean venture capitalists in 2006, concerns about the technology had run deep for months. "CGK has tried to reproduce the technology but in vain," the company said in a written response to questions from a reporter for Science. In mid-February, CEO Jin Hwan Kim informed KAIST officials of the company's difficulties with MAGIC, prompting KAIST to launch a departmental investigation the next day.

The school followed a protocol established by the Ministry of Science and Technology after a scandal over fraudulent stem cell publications by Seoul National University professor Woo Suk Hwang. Seo says investigators approached Tae Kook Kim, who couldn't provide notebooks or original data for the experiments. The task force interviewed members of Kim's team and met twice with Jaejoon Won, the first author of both studies. After the second interview, Seo says, Won sent a written statement to the committee that, Seo says, admitted "serious scientific misconduct in both papers." The committee reported its findings to KAIST President Nam Pyo Suh on 28 February. The school then suspended Kim and notified the journals. Science posted an Editorial Expression of Concern about the paper online on 3 March, and editors at Science and Nature Chemical Biology say they're hoping to hear from all the authors, or learn the outcome of the investigation, before retracting the papers.

Both journals say the papers garnered praise. "Reviewers were very enthusiastic," says Kelner. Notes Terry Sheppard, chief editor of Nature Chemical Biology: "The referee comments, I thought, were quite consistent with a favorable response."

But in response to a reporter's questions, CGK listed eight problems with MAGIC, in which magnetized nanoparticles are prodded to interact with proteins in cells. Among them were the type of magnetic nanoparticle used and the resolution of the microscope that authors say generated the published images. It "cannot produce the results shown," according to CGK.

Science began routine screening of images for manipulation in 2006, after publishing Kim's paper in July 2005. The Nature journals instituted image screening a few months after publishing their paper from Kim and his colleagues in the summer of 2006.

Kim's mentors were stunned to learn of KAIST's initial findings. "I certainly would never have expected this," says Tom Maniatis, a molecular biologist at Harvard University who supervised Kim's postdoc work in the mid-1990s. Maniatis described Kim as "an extremely hard worker, very efficient, very focused," echoing comments from Kim's Ph.D. adviser, Robert Roeder of Rockefeller University in New York City. The work Kim performed in Maniatis's lab, on interferon genes, has held up, as have his experiments under Roeder.

After his postdoc, Kim landed a coveted fellowship at Harvard's Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology, as well as a post with Seoul National University's Institute for Molecular Biology and Genetics. It was at this time that he began focusing on ways to identify drug targets. MAGIC does this by coating a magnetized nanoparticle with a small molecule of interest; the particle is then gulped up by a cell. Proteins are tagged one after another with fluorescent labels, and scientists apply a magnetic field to the cell. This forces the nanoparticle to move, and researchers can observe whether a particular protein moves with it, indicating that the small molecule has bound to the protein. The 2006 Nature Chemical Biology paper showed that MAGIC could pick up two proteins that reset a cell's aging clock.

Although the MAGIC technology was eye-catching, it apparently wasn't hugely popular. "I don't know anybody who was using" MAGIC, says Brent Stockwell, a chemical biologist at Columbia University who knew Kim somewhat when the two were at Harvard. Stockwell recalls reading the Science paper and wondering whether it "seemed too good to be true." Because the technique melded different disciplines, he adds, "it would be hard to find anyone who would have expertise in all" of them.

Over the past year, Kim had become embroiled in a patent dispute between KAIST and CGK over rights to MAGIC. Last July, KAIST suspended Kim for 6 months for allegedly bypassing the school's normal patent procedures, and Kim had been aggressively job-hunting, seeking references from Roeder and Maniatis. "I must have sent out 30 letters in the last month," Maniatis says.

Kim was still listed as CGK's "scientific director and founder" on the company's Web site this week. But CGK says it has developed an alternative to the MAGIC technique and hopes to build a business around it.