Should modern technologies be used by women who seek to conceive a child after the death of their partners? One wonders why we are witnessing all this hand-wringing, particularly since nothing has actually happened in this area. The Independent thought the issue so important that it ran a leader, as...
Limited use of genetic testing at work to allow the detection of conditions that may put the employee or others in danger has been cautiously approved by government advisors in the UK. The report, published last week by the Human Genetics Advisory Commission, does not recommend a total ban on...
Both alcohol and nicotine dependency may be the result of a common genetic factor, according to a study published in the July issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry (1999;56). Dr William E True of St Louis University, Missouri and colleagues examined 3,356 male-male twins in the Vietnam Era...
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...
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...
The association of foundations that promote the sciences and humanities in Germany, the Stifterverband fur die Deutsche Wissenschaft, has launched a DM500,000 (US$260,000) programme called the Public Understanding of Sciences and Humanities - modelled on a similar scheme in the UK. This is the first move made by a group...
Compiling a detailed map of the human genome will take significantly more time and resources than previously thought, according to an article published in the June issue of Nature Genetics. Dr Leonid Kruglyak argues that the current gene-mapping efforts to identify 400,000 genetic markers to isolate genes for common diseases...
A 50-year old man suffering from haemophilia A last week became the first person to receive in vivo gene therapy for his condition. The genetically inherited blood disorder affects about 1 in 10,000 men. Affected men carry a defect in the gene for the blood-clotting protein, factor VIII, which...
Subscribe for free to what PET does best – informing you of the latest in fertility, genomics and embryo research.
