Cloning master apologizes, quits

TOKYO — Hwang Woo-suk, a stem-cell pioneer whose South Korean team cloned the first human embryo and created the first cloned dog, publicly apologized Thursday for ethical breaches at his lab and said he would resign from all his official posts.

Under mounting pressure from the international scientific community, Hwang, 52, admitted his team had used eggs extracted from two of his junior scientists during research that led to the team's historic report on cloning of a human embryo in 2004.

Such practices are considered highly unethical in international scientific circles. Choking back tears, Hwang, considered a national hero in South Korea, said he had not known about the women's donations until the magazine Nature began investigating the source of his team's eggs last year.

Even after discovering the truth, however, he denied the accusations out of fear his research would be jeopardized, he said. The women, he said, had asked that their privacy be maintained. "Being too focused on scientific development, I may not have seen all the ethical issues related to my research," Hwang said.

Hwang, a veterinary professor at Seoul National University, has recently been followed by international allegations of ethical impropriety that threatened to impede his work.

Last month, he — along with several leading scientists — launched the Seoul-based World Stem Cell Hub, a project aimed at seeking treatments for incurable diseases.

Why he's famous


What: Hwang Woo-suk and his team at Seoul National University demonstrated it was possible to create stem cells tailored to individual patients who have spinal-cord injuries or genetic ailments such as juvenile diabetes.

How: Scientists remove the genetic material from eggs donated by healthy women. Then they replace it with DNA from the patients and prompt some of the eggs to grow into embryos. After five days, the embryos are transferred into culture dishes, where some develop into stem cells that are genetic matches of their DNA donors.

In August, Hwang and his colleagues introduced Snuppy, the first cloned dog.

Los Angeles Times

The hub was announced with great fanfare as an effort to distribute hundreds of customized stem-cell colonies to researchers around the world, including U.S. researchers who have been unable to gain access to such cells under restrictions imposed by President Bush in 2001. Thousands of patients quickly signed up to donate their cells for the research.

Project officials announced plans to open cloning centers in San Francisco and London. But U.S. support for the effort is waning in the wake of the egg-donation scandal.

Earlier this month, University of Pittsburgh researcher Gerald Schatten pulled out of his partnership with Hwang, citing concerns about the way Hwang's group had obtained human eggs, whose difficult procurement is typically one of the most vexing obstacles to large-scale stem-cell research.

For Hwang, whose English is marginal, Schatten served as an eloquent translator and link to the centers of scientific power in the Western world.

Hwang said Thursday he would resign as head of the project "to atone to the public."

"I am very sorry that I have to tell the public words that are too shameful and horrible," Hwang said, appearing downcast and solemn at a packed news conference. "I should be here reporting the successful results of our research, but I'm sorry instead to have to apologize."

Unaware of standards

Hwang's admission may hamper global collaboration based on his research, heralded as a critical step in jump-starting treatment for such ailments as Alzheimer's disease, diabetes and spinal-cord injuries.

The controversy showed how difficult it will be to hold to internationally accepted standards in the sensitive field of stem-cell research and cloning, particularly among countries with different societal traditions. Thousands of South Koreans took to the Internet and airwaves this week to defend Hwang, with many appearing baffled by why foreigners would see the donations as ethical violations.

Hwang said he and his researchers didn't realize their actions could breach ethical norms and they didn't know about the World Medical Association's Helsinki Declaration on human research.

The declaration, drawn up in 1964, sets global standards for human experiments to ensure they are safe, necessary for the advancement of medical research and don't involve coercion.

Obtaining eggs from team members is widely viewed outside South Korea as off-limits because of the potential for subtle coercion, given the hierarchal structure of lab research, something especially true in South Korea.

"Hwang had no Western educational background, and unlike the West, Korean institutions have no systematic way of reviewing, judging and clarifying research result in a step-by-step process," said Hwang Yoo-sung, president of NeoDin Medical Institute, a Seoul research lab. He is not related to Hwang Woo-suk.

The dust-up is also renewing debate over how scientists plan to collect women's eggs, vital to their controversial work. Thousands of eggs are necessary to complete cloning projects and few ethical guidelines exist governing how donors, who undergo a monthlong series of hormone injections followed by a surgical procedure, should be treated.

The two women, in statements to a government commission that were later made available to the media, said they made their donations in secret and under false names after Hwang refused their offers. At the time, the team was desperately in need of additional eggs for its stem-cell work.

In an interview, Hwang said Thursday that he had turned them down because it might pressure other staff members to do the same. He said he confronted the two in May 2004, after a reporter from Nature magazine made inquiries about the donations. One of the women, a doctoral student and researcher, admitted the donation to the magazine and then retracted it. Soon after, both women told Hwang.

After Nature's article, Hwang said he came to understand the implications. But he withheld the truth, he said, to protect his researchers from public embarrassment.

In August, Hwang's team was hailed again, this time for creating Snuppy, the world's first cloned dog. Time magazine called Snuppy's cloning the year's most amazing invention because dogs are considered one of the most difficult animals to clone.

At the time, Hwang said his group's primary aim was to develop genetically identical laboratory dogs for the study of animal and human diseases.

But ethical allegations persisted.

On Monday, Roh Sungi-il, head of MizMedi Women's Hospital in Seoul, also admitted he had paid about $1,447 each to 20 women to gather human eggs for Hwang's research.

Roh said he had not informed Hwang about the payments until recently. The payments, which ended in 2003, were not illegal under existing South Korean laws.

"No violations"

An investigation by South Korea's Health Ministry, whose findings were also released Thursday, described the donations by Hwang's team members as neither "coerced or coaxed" and concluded there had been "no violation of ethics guidelines" committed by Hwang's team.

But Hwang had always insisted the eggs used in his research were made by donors who gave them in hopes of helping his work and not for profit. Thursday, Hwang said that although he had resigned from all government-funded scientific groups, he would continue his research.

One of his biggest problems, Hwang said, was that he was setting precedent. "Everything we tried was the world's first," he said. "We were making the very first footprints on a snow-covered field. In that process, we lacked insight into law and ethics."

The South Korean government, which has staunchly backed Hwang, announced the creation Thursday of a state-run egg bank with closely monitored guidelines. It would mark the first time a nation has taken such an official role in stem-cell research, highlighting the scramble by South Korean officials to salvage the nation's reputation as the world's leading center for such science.

Indeed, the government has commissioned stamps depicting the hopes for Hwang's research: a man rising from a wheelchair and walking.

Material from The Associated Press, Bloomberg News, Reuters, The Associated Press and The Seattle Times archives is included in this report.