SEOUL: A junior researcher working for South Korea's discredited cloning expert Hwang Woo-suk was forced to give her own eggs for his research, according

to a TV report yesterday.

Hwang has admitted receiving eggs from junior researchers on his team but has insisted that the donations were made freely and that he did not know at the

time where they came from.

However, MBC TV's investigative programme PD Notebook said the researcher was forced by Hwang to donate her own eggs after she toppled a laboratory petri dish

containing ova in March 2003.

MBC said in a press release that PD Notebook would reveal in its scheduled edition later yesterday an e-mail sent to a colleague by the researcher Park

Eul-soon, in which she said she wished she had stood up to Hwang and refused to donate eggs.

Park, in her mid-20s, said she had received hormone injections to induce ovulation and underwent a general anaesthetic, according to MBC.

MBC also alleged that Hwang had lied about the number of human eggs he had used for his research.

It said Hwang had used some 1,600 human eggs from 86 women for his 2004 and 2005 research and many of the eggs were purchased. About 20 percent of these

women experienced side effects from surgical procedures to extract eggs, the report said.

Hwang's team claimed they had used 242 eggs in 2004 research and 273 eggs for a 2005 study to clone human embryos.

PD Notebook began questioning Hwang's research in November, revealing that two junior researchers donated their own eggs in breach of internationally

accepted research ethics.

Last month an official probe by Seoul National University revealed that Hwang had entirely fabricated his landmark 2005 paper in Science journal in which he

claimed to have created patient-tailored stem cells.

Source: China Daily