This week at the Progress Educational Trust (29 July 2010)

The (perceived and actual) relationship between genetics and race is something that the the Progress Educational Trust (PET) has been interested in for a while. Last year's Channel 4 season Race: Science's Last Taboo (including the programme Is It Better To Be Mixed Race? presented by BioNews volunteer writer Aarathi Prasad), the increasing availability of genetic testing, and even the hugely popular BBC series Who Do You Think You Are? all point to growing public interest in the relationship between heredity, ancestry and race.

Which is why we are excited to hear that we will be receiving a grant from the Wellcome Trust to support a project entitled Genes, Ancestry and Racial Identity: Does It Matter Where Your Genes Come From?. The project will incorporate three public debates, an online poll, and the dissemination of a variety of related material on BioNews and elsewhere. More details will be posted here in due course.

The other main news this week, as our Science Editor Dr Vivienne Raper reports in the BioNews story New breed of fertility watchdog on way, is that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority could be split up as part of the Government's review of health arms-length bodies. Here at PET, we are watching these developments with interest. Our hope is that whoever is ultimately responsible for regulating the sector will do just that, and not be sidetracked into other areas.

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Other news

• PET's Founding Chair of Trustees Professor Marcus Pembrey is coauthor of the paper 'Parental and Grandparental Ages in the Autistic Spectrum Disorders: A Birth Cohort Study', published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.

• PET Adviser Dr Tessa Homfray appears in the BBC News item Genes of patients mapped by NHS for first time, in which she can be seen offering genetic counselling to BBC Medical Correspondent Fergus Walsh.

• Gozde Zorlu, a Volunteer Writer at BioNews, is coauthor of the Guardian newspaper's front-page article 'Huge disparity in NHS death rates revealed'. She is also coauthor of the related articles 'Safety in numbers for hospital patients' and 'Flaws in hospital episode statistics revealed by freedom of information requests', and the data behind all of these articles is available here.

• PET Adviser James Lawford-Davies' contribution to the 2009 conference Stem Cell Policy in the Obama Age: Texas, US and UK Perspectives forms part of a newly published report of the conference proceedings (.pdf 4.03MB).

• PET Adviser Laura Riley is quoted in the BBC News article '80 IVF fetuses are aborted a year figures show'.

• Pioneering work on epigenetics by PET's Founding Chair of Trustees, Professor Marcus Pembrey, is discussed in the TIME magazine article 'Why your DNA isn't your destiny'.

• PET/BioNews Science Editor Dr Vivienne Raper is author of several articles in recent issues of How it Works magazine, including articles on quicksand and the Grand Canyon in Issue 7 and on the world's deep oceans in Issue 8.

• A video recording of the Battle of Ideas session Frankenstein's Daughters: From Science Fiction to Science Fact?, featuring PET Communications Officer Sandy Starr and PET Adviser Dr Alan Thornhill, has been published online by WORLDwrite.

• PET Adviser Fiona Fox's most recent columns for the BBC Academy's College of Journalism are Climategate: too easy to blame the reporters, 'He says/she says' just doesn't work for science, and The eerie electoral silence of scientific institutions.

• PET Adviser Alastair Kent will be debating the motion 'This house believes that all genetic professionals have a duty to encourage families with inherited diseases to enter into research studies' at the British Society for Human Genetics annual conference on Monday 6 September 2010.

• PET Adviser Stuart Lavery is coauthor of the paper 'Congenital uterine anomalies and their impact on fertility', published in the journal Women's Health.

• PET Adviser Dr Alan Thornhill is coauthor of the paper 'Accreditation of the PGD laboratory', published in the journal Human Reproduction.

• PET Adviser Dr Fred Kavalier is coauthor of the paper 'Antenatal screening for haemoglobinopathies in primary care: a cohort study and cluster randomised trial to inform a simulation model. The Screening for Haemoglobinopathies in First Trimester trial', published in the journal Health Technology Assessment.

• PET Adviser Dr Tessa Homfray is coauthor of the paper 'Linkage and sequence analysis indicate that CCBE1 is mutated in recessively inherited generalised lymphatic dysplasia', published in the journal Human Genetics.

• PET Adviser Laura Riley is coauthor of the paper 'Women's opinions on the home management of early medical abortion in the UK', published in the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Healthcare.

• PET Adviser Dr Stephen Minger is coauthor of the paper 'Increased neural progenitors in vascular dementia', which has been published online ahead of its appearance in the journal Neurobiology of Ageing.

• PET Adviser Stuart Lavery is quoted in the Irish Independent article 'The baby makers'.

• PET Adviser Alastair Kent is quoted in the BBC News article 'Rare diseases research lacking'.