SEOUL, South Korea, Thursday, Jan. 12 - Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, the disgraced stem cell scientist, apologized Thursday for falsifying data in his research, and prosecutors raided his home and labs to investigate work that had propelled South Korea to the top of global stem cell research before it was found to be fraudulent.
"I feel so crushed and humiliated that I hardly have the energy to say I am sorry," Dr. Hwang said during a nationally televised news conference, which came two days after a panel from Seoul National University, where he had done his work, determined that both of his landmark stem cell papers were fakes. "I seek your forgiveness."
Dr. Hwang's tearful apology, which he offered with 20 colleagues standing behind him, marked a grand anticlimax to his career.
But he stuck to his earlier claim that most of the crucial falsifications were committed - without his knowledge - by members of his research partner, MizMedi Hospital in Seoul. MizMedi has denied his claim.
In its report on Tuesday, a university panel said Dr. Hwang had never produced stem cell lines, as he claimed in two main scientific papers, published in the journal Science in 2004 and 2005. His research team did create some cloned human embryos but advanced only to an early stage in a delicate procedure of extracting stem cell lines from the embryos, the panel said.
On Thursday, Dr. Hwang said his team had created 101 cloned embryos by transferring nuclei of adults' body cells into human eggs, an achievement he called "still the best in the world."
He said things went wrong after he handed the embryos in an early stage of development to MizMedi, which has specialists in extracting stem cell lines from fertilized eggs. When MizMedi reported to him that the hospital had also extracted stem cells from his cloned embryos, he said, "I felt my dream come true."
"I 100 percent trusted what they told me," he said. "Now I believe that they completely cheated me." "
Earlier Thursday, prosecutors raided his home and offices, as well as the MizMedi lab and the homes of other researchers. They confiscated computer files and other data. The investigators are looking into whether Dr. Hwang's use of government funds for his experiments violated the nation's antifraud law.
