Cells are the building blocks of living things. A human body is made up of around 100 trillion cells.
Doctors at St Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston (US) have injected engineered DNA into an 81 year old's heart muscles to help restore blood-flow to clogged arteries by using a catheter for the first time - without the use of anaesthesia. Until now, the DNA was was injected into the heart...
Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, have reported the identification of a gene that plays an important role in the development of cells essential to hearing. Writing in the journal Science, the researchers describe how they found that mice without the Math1 gene never developed hair-cell bundles...
Researchers at the University of Hawaii, who developed the first mouse clones last year using the Honolulu Technique, have reported the successful production of male mouse clones. Their report appears in the June issue of Nature Genetics. To date, all mammal clones produced from adult somatic cells are female, as...
After six months of deliberation, a US presidential commission has decided to advise the federal government to fund some kinds of research using human embryos. A draft report of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission specifically refers to the recent breakthrough in human embryonic stem cell research, which offers the real...
This week's BioNews includes news from the United States of the first children born as a result of IVF and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for sickle cell disease. Because of PGD, the couple concerned was able to start a pregnancy knowing that it was free of the genetic fault which...
Last week's announcement that a Montreal-based biotechnology firm had successfully cloned three goats has rekindled concerns about human cloning in Canada. Despite the existence of a voluntary moratorium on human cloning, in late April the Canadian Health Minister Allan Rock announced the federal government's intention to introduce legislation criminalising certain...
This week's BioNews includes news from France that nuclear transfer technology may cause long-term health problems in the resulting clones. A team of scientists led by Jean-Paul Renard reported in the Lancet that a cloned calf, born after nuclear transfer from an adult skin cell, died of sudden anaemia seven...
Cloned animals could suffer from serious genetic defects, according to a paper published in the Lancet. The authors report that a calf cloned from an adult cell may have died because of errors in its genetic reprogramming. Although there have been many reports of clones dying during or shortly after...
Spain's National Commission on Assisted Reproduction has issued a series of recommendations to the government on a variety of issues in assisted reproduction, including the live issue of reproductive and therapeutic uses of cloning technology as well as familiar issues surrounding embryo and gamete freezing. The commission's report underlines the...
The Wellcome Trust is to fund 67% of a two year, $45m (£30m), international project to define some 300,000 DNA sequence variations in the human genome. The remaining funds come from a consortium of ten of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, who have also agreed to put the newly discovered...
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