South Korea's disgraced cloning ‘pioneer’ Hwang Woo-suk has now apologised for the fact that his claim to have cloned a human being was a load of fraudulent bilge. Given the scale of the claim, this was a simply massive fraud. He says he was deceived by junior researchers into using fabricated results:

'The use of fake data... is what I have to take full responsibility for as first author. I acknowledge all of that and apologise once again,’ he said.

However, one further question has so far not been raised. Dr Hwang’s paper making the false claim that he had cloned a human being was published in Science, the leading journal of scientific research, in 2004. A further paper that he published on the subject in Science in 2005 similarly contained false data. Like other such scientific journals, Science’s reputation is based on the fact that its papers are all peer-reviewed, the gold standard of scientific credibility and authority. Peer-review is supposed to be the ultimate protection against flaky science passing itself off as the real thing.

So how did Science come to publish such lies -- and of the most high-profile kind? What kind of checks does it make on the material it publishes, including the peer-reviewers? Just who peer-reviewed Dr Hwang’s papers? And what does this imply more broadly about the standards used by the peers who do the reviewing for the papers published in such journals, and indeed the credibility of those journals?

For some time now, some scientific researchers have been expressing mounting unease about the standards of scientific journals which claim to be utterly authoritative but in fact have agendas of their own. It is said that some such journals refuse to publish rigorous work which punctures the ideological viewpoint of the journal’s editor, or conversely publish rubbish which is shoe-horned in on the basis of highly inadequate peer-reviews simply because it does correspond to those prejudices. The scandal over Dr Hwang surely makes an investigation into standards at these journals now very pressing.