AUSTRALIANS SUE OVER THEIR “WRONGFUL LIVES”
Two "wrongful life" cases are being studied by the High Court of Australia. One involves Alexia Harriton, a 24-year-old woman who is blind, deaf, spastic...
CREATING KIDS FOR SEX SELECTION RESEARCH
A leading US medical school is to create children to study the social and personal impact of sex selection. Dr Sandra Carson, of Baylor College...
FRUSTRATION CAN LEAD SCIENTISTS INTO TEMPTATION
Thoroughness by institutional review boards can frustrate scientists so much that they will ignore guidelines, break rules and become deceitful, a social science researcher has...
IVF GROWTH SLOWS IN US
Growth of the IVF industry may be slowing as the youngest baby boomers enter their 40s, according to a report in the Boston Globe. IVF...
IN BRIEF: hospices; embryo status; Vioxx; adult stem cells
November is National Hospice Month in the US. The Hospice Foundation of America has a number of publications about its work on its website, www.hospicefoundation.org....
TO OUR READERS:
Kass farewells bioethics council with ageing report Ageing is unpleasant, unwanted, and unprofitable. But the US will have to adjust to a large increase in...
A second look at PGD
A technique for detecting abnormalities in embryos may have been giving misleading results, according to papers presented at a Montreal conference of US and Canadian...
Financial links to drug use guidelines
Many of the researchers and doctors who write the rules on prescribing drugs have financial connections to the manufacturers, according to an investigation by the...
South Korea cloner opens stem cell “library” in US and UK
Korean cloning expert Hwang Woo-suk is to open a stem-cell "library" in Seoul with satellite laboratories in San Francisco and Oxford where human embryos can...
Foetal stem cells to be used to cure children
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the first transplant of foetal stem cells to cure a rare and fatal children's disease. It says...
IN BRIEF: DNR; patents; cosmetic surgery; animal liberation
Do not resuscitate: British stroke patients with "do not resuscitate" orders on their medical notes are seven times more likely to die in the first...
New stem cell techniques fail to quench controversy
It may be possible to obtain embryonic stem cells without killing embryos, according to two papers published in the latest issue of Nature. Although many...