Scientist who faked HIV ‘miracle’ vaccine jailed for 4 years
A scientist who pretended to have found a potential vaccine for HIV has been jailed.
Dong-Pyou Han, who was a researcher at Iowa State University, had raised hopes of a potential vaccine after his ‘ground-breaking’ findings, securing millions in funds for further research.
However, in 2013 the academic resigned, after admitting that he had falsified his research, even mixing human antibodies with rabbit blood samples to make it appear more effective.
The former assistant professor of biomedical sciences was charged with falsifying HIV vaccine research, and has this week been hit with a rare prison sentence for the crime.
He has been sentenced to four and a half years behind bars, and has also been ordered to repay more than $7.2 million that his team received in grants from the National Institutes of Health using the fake data.
Nicholas Kleinfeldt, the US attorney for the southern district of Iowa, told CNN of the prison sentence: “Just because somebody has a PhD, just because someone’s involved in the scientific community, doesn’t mean they’re going to necessarily be treated differently than anyone else who’s committed a criminal offence.”
North Korea also recently reported a supposed “miracle cure” for HIV, claiming its Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un had somehow advised scientists to find the cure for AIDS, cancer and Ebola
The dictatorship’s state-run propaganda agency, the Korean Central News Agency, made the claim, asserting that the despot’s scientists has developed a miracle drug, known as Kumdang-2, from common plant ginseng.
