Public Calls for Stricter Ova Regulation
By The Korea Times,
The Korea Times
| 01. 12. 2006
Voices are getting louder over the revision of the bioethics law amid allegations that female researchers of Prof. Hwang Woo-suk's team were forced to donate their ova for stem cell experiments.
Prof. Chung Myung-hee, head of the Seoul National University (SNU) panel investigating Hwang's fabrication of research data, announced Tuesday that a total of 2,061 eggs from 129 females were collected from four hospitals and provided to his team for three years from November 2002.
The key question is whether Hwang's team has violated the bioethics law that took effect in January last year.
The law forbids the trade of sperm and ova for commercial purposes. It stipulates that those offering ovum for a commercial purpose are subject to prison terms of up to three years and those arranging the illegal trade may face imprisonment of up to two years.
In short, if egg-donation takes place voluntarily without commercial benefits, it is not punishable. In addition, those who were involved even in commercial ova trading that took place before 2005 are not subject to any punishment.
Cloning scientist Hwang admitted...
Related Articles
By Tomoko Otake, The Japan Times | 04.09.2024
A decade ago, researcher Haruko Obokata caused a sensation when she published two papers in the journal Nature, in which she claimed that she had discovered a way to create stem cells easily using the so-called STAP method.
With STAP...
By Ian Sample, The Guardian | 03.08.2024
Scientists are a step closer to making IVF eggs from patients’ skin cells after adapting the procedure that created Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, more than two decades ago.
The work raises the prospect of older women being...
By Ramon Antonio Vargas, The Guardian | 02.28.2024
Doctors say a man in California who contracted blood cancer while living with HIV is in remission from both potentially fatal illnesses thanks to a treatment they are hailing as remarkable and encouraging.
Paul Edmonds is only the fifth-known person...
By Victoria Gray, Uduak Thomas, and Kevin Davies, The CRISPR Journal | 02.14.2024
In July 2019, medical staff in Nashville dosed the first U.S. patient in the exa-cel therapy trial, sponsored by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics. That first patient was Victoria Gray, a mother of four from Forest, Mississippi, a sickle cell...