Cells are the building blocks of living things. A human body is made up of around 100 trillion cells.
Reports of herds of identical cattle have been raised by the news that Japanese and American scientists have successfully cloned six calves from a bull's ear. The information has been leaked from a research paper awaiting publication, written by scientists from Connecticut University in America and the Kagoshima Prefectural Cattle...
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...
Since the US breakthrough in embryonic stem cell research last December, American politicians have been limbering themselves up for a fight over whether such research should receive federal funding. But, as we report in this week's BioNews, it might not be as much of a battle as had been previously...
Johns Hopkins researchers have reported the first successful use of gene therapy to activate the human immune system against prostate cancer. The results are published in the October 15 issue of Cancer Research. The Johns Hopkins gene therapy for prostate cancer is tailor-made for patients. The vaccine activates the immune...
The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe last week approved a recommendation that 'neither plant, animal nor human derived genes, cells, tissue or organs' should be regarded as inventions and thereby be subject to patents. This declaration is in direct conflict with last year's European Union directive which allows...
Genetic analysis of Dolly the sheep's cells has revealed that the genes in her mitochondria - the powerhouses of cells - have come from another sheep involved in the cloning experiment. In the cloning technique of cell nucleus replacement, a donor cell nucleus is fused with a donor egg stripped of its...
President Clinton's ethics advisors on biotechnology issues were finalising details of their long-awaited recommendations on stem cell research, last week. As suggested by the tenor of their draft recommendations, they are expected to advise a change in the law to allow federal funding of such research. The National Bioethics Advisory...
A senior consultant has been suspended from his National Health Service (NHS) post amid allegations that safety controls were breached in a pioneering gene therapy trial on liver cancer patients. Nagy Habib, head of liver surgery at Hammersmith hospital in west London, is said to have injected 19 patients with...
Despite the government's recent announcement of a delay in making a decision on whether to allow human embryo research using cloning techniques, it appears that some research may be legally possible in the UK. So-called therapeutic cloning attempts to marry developments in embryo stem cell research with cloning technology, in...
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