Human cloning success sparks heated debate

The People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, the nation's leading civic group, immediately voiced strong criticism against the achievement. "Researchers pushed the project ignoring the ethical problem that their study poses. Their behavior is irresponsible," it said in the statement released Thursday.

Hwang Woo-suk, professor at Seoul National University, and his colleagues were reported Thursday to have taken stem cells from a cloned a human embryo for the first time in the world. "This is the greatest achievement we have ever seen in this field.

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Hwang's research has paved a way for new cell therapy technologies," Lim Jung-mook, an embryology scientist, said.

The embryonic stem cells the Korean team obtained are believed to be a master source of all human tissues. The cells can be grown as any organ or nerve cells and offer new cures to sufferers of serious illnesses, experts say.

"But to extract the stem cells, researchers should kill the cloned human embryos. Given that the embryo is an early stage of human life, the behavior is obviously unethical," Kim Byoung-soo, science issue coordinator of the civic group said.