Tokyo

Unwatched: questions have been raised over how Woo Suk Hwang's laboratory obtained human eggs. Credit: J.-M. LEE/AP

Bioethicists are pushing for an investigation into the cloning work of a South Korean research team — but are having no luck in finding someone to lead it.

Woo Suk Hwang from Seoul National University and colleagues cloned a human somatic cell, creating an embryo that they used to establish a stem-cell line. It was a huge leap in a field full of medical promise and a major boost for Korean science.

But ethical questions have been raised, particularly about how egg donors were recruited for the experiment and whether they included junior members of the laboratory (see Nature 429, 3; 2004).

Hwang denies that any members of his laboratory were donors and he is backed up by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Hanyang University Hospital in Seoul, which originally approved the experiment.

But critics question whether the board has been sufficiently rigorous. At its annual meeting in Seoul on 22 May, the Korean Bioethics Association called on Hwang and the review board to answer questions concerning the recruitment of donors and funding sources. “We request the institutes involved and the participants to present clear explanations regarding the following queries about therapeutic human embryonic cloning research,” reads the statement they issued.

The questions, posted on the association's homepage and picked up by major South Korean newspapers, include: “Did the Hanyang University Hospital's IRB perform a continuing review on this research project in order to monitor its ethics?”

Some bioethicists accuse the board of not including the non-researchers required by guidelines from the Korea Food and Drug Administration. Institutional review boards are obliged to include “more than one attorney or religious representative, not from the fields of medicine, dentistry, oriental medicine, pharmacy or nursing sciences”. Hanyang's consisted of 12 doctors, a pharmacologist, a nurse and a theologian.

The bioethics association wants the case pursued by the National Human Rights Commission, an independent investigative body funded by the government. The commission established a bioethics task force two months ago, but senior commissioner Kyung Seo Park says it was set up to implement rules that come into force next year, not to investigate specific research projects.

“There are no provisions to deal with special cases like Professor Hwang's,” Park says. He admits that last month a member of the task force asked the Hanyang review board for documents about the research, and that the board said it was not possible to provide them. But he adds, “The task force does not have any kind of binding power so I told them to stop.” Park says the commission may still take up an investigation later.

The situation worries Young Mo Koo, a medical ethicist at the University of Ulsan College of Medicine and member of the bioethics association. The Korea Food and Drug Administration oversees commercial projects, but no one regulates basic research involving human samples, says Koo. “It's a grey area,” he adds. “There is a serious need for an investigation.”