A CLONING pioneer and South Korean national hero has been forced to resign over breaches of the ethical code governing experiments on human embryos.

Hwang Woo-Suk, the first man to clone a human embryo and produce from it a stem-cell line, gave up his official posts yesterday after admitting that researchers in his team had donated their eggs and that other women had been paid for theirs. He admitted that he had lied about the origin of the human eggs available to his researchers.

“I feel so sorry to speak about such shameful and miserable things to you,” he told reporters. “I again sincerely apologise for having caused concern at home and abroad.”

Professor Hwang said that he was resigning from all official posts, including the chairmanship of the World Stem Cell Hub, established last month by the South Korean Government to produce stem-cell lines for research worldwide. The controversy flared last year after allegations were published in the journal Nature that two junior members of the team had donated their eggs.

This contravenes accepted principles that junior researchers should not use their own bodies or body parts in research, as they are deemed to be in a dependent relationship and vulnerable to pressure. Professor Hwang denied allegations contained in the Nature report at the time. The controversy reignited last week when Gerald Schatten, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a partner in the research, said that he was severing ties because he suspected that the allegations were true.

Professor Hwang said that when two researchers offered their eggs to him he turned them away. Then, without his knowledge, they donated eggs using false names in 2003. He said that he later found out the truth but lied to Nature because the women had asked him to. “I could not ignore the strong request by the researchers to protect their privacy,” he said.

He admitted that his team had received some eggs from women who received money in return without his knowledge. Researchers in the United States and elsewhere, whose studies had been constrained by a lack of ova, expressed surprise last year when Professor Hwang said that the Korean team had used 242 human eggs to create one stem-cell line.

Robin Lovell-Badge, of the National Institute for Medical Research in London, said: “The research field can learn lessons from the whole story. The excellent research carried out by Hwang and his team must continue, but in a way that considers the ethics in an appropriate way.”

Professor Stephen Minger, a stem-cell researcher at King’s College London, added: “This highlights why the tough regulatory climate in the UK is protection rather than a problem.”

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