'Women forced to give eggs'
2006-02-02 21:29
Seoul - Two junior researchers working for South Korea's disgraced cloning expert Hwang Woo-Suk were forced to give their own eggs for his work, a state bio-ethics committee said on Thursday.
In the latest of a series of damaging revelations about Hwang, who could be facing criminal charges, the national bio-ethics committee said he handed out consent letters for egg donation, which the women were forced to sign.
"Professor Hwang had kept lying about the provision of human eggs from his researchers. This greatly damaged the integrity of (his) scientific research," the committee's acting chairperson Cho Han-Ik said.
Hwang has admitted receiving eggs from junior researchers in breach of accepted international ethical standards, but has denied forcing his staff to contribute eggs to his now discredited stem-cell research.
Research disputed
An expert panel last month found that his work had been fabricated and that he had failed to create any patient-specific stem-cell lines, which had been hailed as a breakthrough that could lead to new treatments for disease.
The committee said on Thursday that Hwang even drove one researcher to a fertility hospital to extract eggs in March 2003.
It also said Hwang's team received 2 221 eggs obtained from 119 women at four medical institutions between November 2002 and December 2005.
Of the 119 women, 66 were paid up to 1.5 million won ($1 550) each.
The committee said it was looking into allegations that a woman's clinic provided Hwang's team with more than 100 ovaries from dubious sources. One ovary usually contains more than 10 immature eggs.
"Further investigation is necessary to determine whether Hwang's team breached the law on bioethics in obtaining eggs and extracting ovaries," Cho said.
Shunned by his peers
Coming into effect in January 2005, the South Korean medical ethics law bans using human eggs obtained directly from the ovary without consent of the patient.
Large quantities of human eggs are needed for the kind of research conducted by Hwang.
Researchers in the United States and elsewhere whose efforts were limited by a lack of ova expressed surprise last year when Hwang revealed that he used 242 human eggs to create one stem-cell line in 2004.
Hwang, 52, was lionised as a national hero after he stunned medical experts in 2005, claiming to have created 11 patient-specific stem cell lines.
But he has been in disgrace since a scientific panel found last month that he had created no stem cells of any kind and that his research data was fabricated.
On Thursday, prosecutors also raided the houses of Hwang and his colleagues for a second time in an attempt to uncover the truth behind the scientist's fabricated data.
Prosecutors confirmed last month that Hwang never created stem cells tailored to individuals as he had claimed in a 2005 scientific paper.
State auditors have also carried out a separate investigation into Hwang's research fund. Hwang and his team have received more than $45m in state funding and civilian donations from 1998.