Seoul: A South Korean hospital admitted on Monday to paying cash for some of the human eggs that cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk used in his ground-breaking stem-cell research.
Payments for the ova were made in late 2002 and early 2003 before South Korea set ethical guidelines earlier this year banning commercial transactions in human eggs.
The hospital bought eggs and donated them to the research conducted by Hwang, whose team is under suspicion of unethical practices in its research on human embryos.
"Some 1,500 dollars was paid to each of those 16 egg donors in compensation," Roh Sung-Il, chief of MizMedi Hospital specialising in treating infertility, said in a press statement.
Roh said, however, Hwang was not aware of the payment.
"I decided to do it alone without consultations with professor Hwang in order to help make a breakthrough in treating incurable diseases," Roh said.
He said it would be "unfair" to punish him for an act conducted before the relevant guidelines banning it were established.
Hwang and his team at Seoul National University made headlines in February 2004 when they announced the first-ever cloning of human embryos, from which they harvested "therapeutic" embryonic stem cells.
In August this year, Hwang's team won plaudits around the world by presenting the world's first cloned dog.
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