This week at the Progress Educational Trust (3 September 2010)

Over the last few weeks, we've been busy organising Progress Educational Trust (PET)'s next evening debate - Paying Egg Donors: A Child At Any Price? - which will take place from 6.30pm to 8.30pm at London's Royal Society of Medicine on the evening of Wednesday 20 October 2010. As always with PET debates, after the initial presentations from our panel, the evening will be devoted to questions and comments from the audience. So if you haven't attended one of our events before, this is a great opportunity to have your say and to listen to other people's views and experiences. This event has already elicited a lot of interest, particularly from the press, so make sure you book your free place by emailing Sandy Starr at

In other news, most of PET's staff is being sent to Coventry. No, we haven't done anything wrong - rather, we'll be at the British Society for Human Genetics annual conference, which is taking place at the University of Warwick in Coventry. If you're attending, you won't be able to miss us. For one thing, we'll be running an exhibition stand using our new stand and leaflets, so do come along and say hello. Additionally, PET's Science Editor Dr Vivienne Raper and PET Adviser Dr Jess Buxton will be running a workshop entitled Scientists Engaging with the Media, together with Mark Henderson (Science Editor of The Times newspaper) and Tom Sheldon (Press Officer at the Science Media Centre).

Other exciting news is that we have had our first Friend of PET join our membership scheme using the new online subscription facility on this website. Becoming a Friend of PET online is easier and faster, and it also entitles you to a discount to our annual conference Passport to Parenthood: The Evidence and Ethics Behind Cross-Border Reproductive Care, taking place from 9.30am to 5pm at London's Institute of Child Health on Wednesday 24 November 2010. So become a Friend of PET today, and start enjoying the benefits!

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Other news

• PET Director Sarah Norcross will give a presentation at the Insights Conference, organised by Merck Serono in collaboration with leading fertility nurses, in Brighton on Friday 8 October 2010.

• PET Communications Officer Sandy Starr will be featured in two sessions at the 6th annual Battle of Ideas festival in London. On Saturday 30 October 2010 he will give a presentation at the session Choosing Tomorrow's Children, and on Sunday 31 October 2010 he will chair the session End of the Peer Revue: Has the Peer Review Process Lost Credibility?. A video recording of the session Frankenstein's Daughters: From Science Fiction to Science Fact? at the 5th annual Battle of Ideas festival, featuring Sandy and PET Adviser Dr Alan Thornhill, can be found here.

• PET's Founding Chair of Trustees Professor Marcus Pembrey will give the closing presentation at the Galton Institute annual conference Epigenetics: Where Life Meets the Genome in London on Wednesday 10 November 2010

• 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'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.

• 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.

• 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'.