With their characteristically English lack of ambition, scientists from Newcastle University and KCL have applied for a three-year licence from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to make chimaeric human-cow embryos. The similarly small-minded Korean authorities have been doing their damnedest to bring low the genius of visionary Hwang Woo-suk:

Seoul, South Korea (AHN) – Disgraced South Korean Hwang Woo-suk on Tuesday testified that a part of the private donations used to produce his fraudulent stem cell research was spent in payments to the Russian Mafia for tissue samples from mammoths, an extinct elephant species.Hwang was indicted in May for allegedly accepting millions of dollars in private donations based on the outcome of his falsified research.

Prosecutors charge that Hwang masterminded a scheme to make his falsified research look like what he claimed was world’s first cloned embryonic stem cells.

“Some of the money was spent in contacting the Russia Mafia as we tried to clone mammoths,” Hwang told the court during a hearing on Tuesday. “But you can’t say that (on the expense claim), so we expensed it as money for cows for experiment.”

Hwang had previously testified that he spent part of more than 1 billion won (U.S. $1 million) in corporate donations for “peripheral activities related to research.”

You know, if I woke up one morning with a plan to resurrect an extinct elephant then I’m not sure my first call would have been to the Russian Mafia, but it’s this kind of lack of imagination that prevented me from ever reaching the status of “Supreme Scientist“. Then again, even Woo-suk isn’t as great as Dr NakaMats, the inventor of the Flying Shoes.

[thanks to Inky Circus]