Thursday, November 24 2005 17:34 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Seoul: South Korean cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk resigned his official posts today (Nov 24, 2005) to take responsibility for ethical violations by his team during landmark research to create the first cloned human embryo.

Hwang said that researchers in his team had donated their own eggs without his permission and that other women were paid for eggs used in his breakthrough project, also without his knowledge.

Hwang, a Korean national hero and the first man to clone a human embryo, admitted that he had lied when ethical questions began to surface last year about the origin of the supply of human eggs available to his researchers.

"I feel so sorry to speak about such shameful and miserable things to you people," he told a press conference in his first public comments on a scandal that has been brewing for months. "I again sincerely apologize for having caused concern at home and abroad."

Hwang said he was resigning all official posts including the chairmanship of a new research body, the World Stem Cell Hub, established last month by the government to produce stem cell lines here for research institutes worldwide.

But Hwang said he would continue his own trail-blazing research and retained the backing of the government, which earlier today said he had done nothing wrong. "There were no breaches of legal or ethical standards in the course of obtaining human eggs for the research," said a spokesman for the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

Hwang and his team in February 2004 announced the first-ever cloning of human embryos, from which they harvested "therapeutic" embryonic stem cells. This year they unveiled the world's first cloned dog.