Two of UK's leading fertility specialists clashed at the High Court last week in a landmark case in which a woman is seeking damages to pay for a surrogate birth. Forty-six year old Patricia Briody is claiming compensation from Helens & Knowsley Health Authority over a medical blunder that left her...
Visitors to the body zone in London's Millennium Dome will be able to see a computer animation showing a womb's-eye view of human sperm racing to fertilise an egg. The 45-second film has taken more than three months of painstaking computer animation by the British company Framestore which made...
Two babies have made legal history by becoming the first British babies to be registered as having two fathers and no mother. Aspen Drewitt-Barlow and twin sister Saffron were born in California last Thursday to their gay parents, Barrie Drewitt and Tony Barlow. The Chelmsford couple who have been together...
American geneticists announced last week that they may be close to finding the minimum number of genes necessary for an organism to survive and reproduce. Reporting in the journal Science, the researchers involved in the 2-year Minimal Genome Project intend to remove all the original DNA from a single-celled...
Gene therapy is becoming a realistic treatment for a number of disorders. At the meeting of the American Society for Haematology in New Orleans, advances in gene therapy for two disorders were reported. These were X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) and haemophilia B. In SCID, affected individuals have virtually no...
After months of speculation, a US government agency last week revealed its proposed guidelines for the federal funding of research using human embryonic stem cells. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) propose to allow the public funding of stem cell research but recommend prohibiting publicly funded scientists from the process...
An international team of researchers has passed a scientific milestone by deciphering, for the first time, the complete genetic code of a human chromosome. Reporting in last week's Nature, researchers from the Wellcome Trust funded Sanger Centre in Cambridge, Keio University in Japan and various US laboratories announced their success...
Patients at certain infertility clinics in the UK have a six times better chance of conceiving than others, according to figures published in the annual patients' guide last week by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). One London clinic is achieving a 'take home baby rate' of 36.7 per...
Speculation about merger talks between SmithKline Beecham and Glaxo Wellcome was rekindled last week after confirmation that Jan Leschly will step down as SB chief executive to pursue his interests in the Internet. Previous merger talks between the two pharmaceutical giants collapsed last February with Mr Leschly's proposed role in...
Researchers at Colorado State University claim to be able to reliably sort sperm with X chromosomes from those with Y chromosomes, thereby allowing the selection of a mammalian offspring's sex when employing artificial insemination. A special dye stains sperm differently depending on which sex chromosome they have. The dyed sperm...
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