Ethicists call for international limits on number of children per sperm donor
The four Nordic National Ethics Councils have called for cross-border regulations on the number of children that can be conceived per sperm or egg donor...
BioNews
Consanguinity
When two individuals share genetic material as the result of them being descended from a common ancestor, e.g. first cousins.
29 articles
Image by Christoph Bock/Max Planck Institute for Informatics via Wikimedia Commons. Depicts a DNA molecule that is methylated on both strands on the centre cytosine.
Dutch sperm donor may have fathered 102 children
A man is being investigated in the Netherlands after claims he fathered over 100 children through sperm donation...
Risk of birth defects from cousin marriage revealed by Bradford study
Marriage between first cousins could double the risk of any offspring having a birth defect, researchers say...
Book Review: Consanguinity in Context
This monograph is desperately needed. Western societies, who often chose consanguineous marriage in the past, have grown to fear it and to denigrate communities where it is commonly practiced...
Event Review: Genomics in Society - Facts, Fictions and Cultures
The conference 'Genomics in Society: Facts, Fictions and Cultures' marked the 10th anniversary of the Economic and Social Research Council's Genomics Network, and also the passing of nearly ten years since the completion of the Human Genome Project...
'Wrongful life' - the children who sue for being born
Increasing numbers of Israeli children with birth defects are suing medical professionals for failing to detect abnormalities and allowing them to be born, says the New Scientist. The magazine reports that such is the Israeli Government's concern over the rise in 'wrongful life' lawsuits it has launched an investigation into the validity of the claims....
A private sperm donor writes...
A shortfall in donated sperm, we are told, has pushed potential recipients onto websites where private sperm donors hawk their reproductive wares. If only the officially sanctioned sperm banks were well stocked, the thinking goes, women would not have to venture into that murky world. But is that correct? What if sperm donation outside the official channels actually carried certain advantages over the clinic system...
Race and genetics in stem cell transplantation
Each year around 2,800 people in the UK have a stem cell transplant, without which they would have shortly faced death, usually from a blood cancer or another blood disorder. The race of a patient is a real factor in how likely they are to match with a donor....
Let's retrospectively release information to Australia's donor-conceived
An Australian commercial television station recently ran a news story about a donor-conceived woman who has heritable bowel cancer (1). She did not inherit it from her mother. She is denied access to information about her sperm donor because he donated before laws in Victoria enabled information to be released to the donor-conceived. She cannot contact her eight half-siblings, who share that donor, to warn them they may be at risk...