The London Stock Exchange censured the drug development company, British Biotech, after completing a 15 month investigation which concluded that the company had violated exchange rules. The exchange said British Biotech had failed to disclose information which could impact on its business and move its share prices between June 1997...
Ben Elton, author of five bestselling novels, and his musician wife will become parents in October of twins conceived by in vitro fertilisation. This is the same month that Elton's new book, Inconceivable, will be published by Bantham Press. In a classic case of life mirroring art - and vice versa...
The British government announced last Friday that more evidence is needed of the potential benefits to human health before the use of cloning techniques for the development of medical treatments is allowed in research. Tessa Jowell, Minister for Public Health, reaffirmed the government's position that the use of cloning techniques...
Stress may be a factor in the reduced fertility of women with long menstrual cycles, according to Danish researchers reporting in the July issue of Fertility and Sterility. The researchers investigated the effects of psychological stress on the length of time it took to conceive for 430 Danish couples planning...
A new sperm-washing procedure has allowed a woman and her HIV-positive husband to conceive a baby without passing the virus to either the fetus or the mother. The first British couple to benefit from this technique conceived two weeks ago after waiting five years for the technique to be perfected...
The US Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute in California has tripled its capacity to sequence the human genome by leasing 24 MegaBACE DNA sequencers. The Joint Genome Institute, which is targeting human chromosomes 5,16 and 19, now has the capacity to sequence 14 million raw bases each day. Federal...
Comment
We must allow therapeutic applications of cloning
by Dr John Gillott
It was against the background of increasing excitement about the therapeutic potential of stem-cell and cloning technologies that the UK Government's Human Genetics Advisory Commission and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority issued a joint report last December. They strongly recommended that the Government give the go-ahead for research using...