S. Korea sees no progress in stem cell research for a decade

February 25, 2014 Leave a comment

S. Korea sees no progress in stem cell research for a decade

Park Gi-hyo, Won Ho-sup

2014.02.18 17:40:23

South Korea has no place in the global competition for stem cell research. The US, Japan and China are running ahead, but Korea has stagnated for ten years after traumatized by the Hwang Woo-suk scandal.
The US, a top country in the field backed by the federal government’s support for embryonic stem cell research since 2009, successfully cloned human embryonic stem cells for the first time in the world last year. Japan became the world’s first country to create induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) in 2006. Last month, a 30-year-old Japanese female researcher took one step further and developed a new technique to create stem cells, called Stimulus-Triggered Acquisition of Pluripotency (STAP). 
China, with its government keenly interested in stem cell research, has produced 12,888 academic papers in the past decade and overtook Korea in quantitative terms.
Meanwhile, Korea has not generated any fruitful results after being embroiled in the former professor Hwang Woo-suk’s cloning fabrication scandal in 2005. It is even behind rivals in new technology competition. Worse yet, the Korean researchers are making rare contributions in the globally-recognized papers and patents.
Only one stem cell paper published by the Korean researchers was announced in 2012 in academic journal whose Impact Factor (IF) including Nature and Cell is above 20 among 562 papers, according to the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning. In terms of the number of highly cited papers, Korea scored the four point level over the last decade, falling short of the global average of six.

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