A prominent fertility scientist whose firm owns Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles is embroiled in a plagiarism dispute that straddles two continents, has triggered legal battles in South Korea and has raised questions about the practices of a leading U.S. fertility journal.
Dr. Kwang-Yul Cha, whose company also owns fertility clinics and a large hospital in Seoul, is listed as the primary author on a medical paper that appeared in December 2005 in the U.S. medical journal Fertility and Sterility.
But that paper appears to be nearly a paragraph-for-paragraph, chart-for-chart copy of a junior researcher's doctoral thesis, which appeared in a Korean medical journal nearly two years earlier, according to a Times review of both papers and the findings of a Korean medical society.
Cha has denied any wrongdoing.
The allegations mark the latest example of a challenge facing the editors of scientific journals: how to ensure that the work they print is honest and original. Doctors often base medical decisions on articles printed in such journals, and researchers similarly rely on them for their studies.
In an international scandal in late 2005, the work of another South Korean scientist was exposed as fraudulent. Hwang Woo-Suk claimed to have created 11 stem cell lines from the DNA of sick and injured patients, publishing his work in the well-respected journal Science. But the articles had to be retracted after questions were raised about his claims, and he ultimately apologized.
The current dispute involves the much more modest thesis of Dr. Jeong-Hwan Kim, 36. He showed that a simple blood test might be able to predict which women are at risk for premature menopause. The test would allow those women to have their eggs retrieved and frozen for later use if they wanted children.
Kim said his research was conducted while he was pursuing doctoral studies at Korea University and doing clinical work at CHA infertility medical center in Seoul, which is part of Cha's medical group.
Cha, 54, has received international accolades for his work on egg freezing and is well known in medical circles in South Korea. But in the United States, he is a somewhat controversial figure. He came under criticism a few years ago for his involvement in a study suggesting that anonymous prayers from strangers might double a woman's chances of fertility.
