Injections of a fat-regulating hormone help rats to lose weight by turning their fat-storing cells into fat-burning cells, say US and Swiss scientists. Rats injected with a gene that makes the hormone leptin displayed 'substantial weight loss' after just two weeks of therapy, say the researchers. They conclude that their...
Researchers from Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China have succeeded in creating a pregnancy using an embryo containing the genetic material of three different people. An egg cell taken from one woman was fertilised by in vitro fertilisation (IVF), creating a one-cell embryo, or zygote. The nucleus of the zygote...
It's strange how scientific studies become news stories. Usually, science journalists trawl the reputable journals for published papers which seem to have important or controversial findings. They write up the findings in layman's terms and get them published the following day. But the latest controversy in reproductive science has taken...
Scientists in the US have announced that babies have been born carrying the DNA of three parents: two women and a man. The babies were the result of a controversial program using ooplasmic transplantation - effectively adding cytoplasm from a donor woman's egg to that surrounding the nucleus of an infertile...
A UK bioethicist claims that a legal loophole could allow male couples to have their own genetic child, using cell nuclear transfer- the technique used to clone Dolly the sheep. Dr Calum MacKellar, a lecturer in bioethics and biochemistry at Edinburgh University, says that it is 'theoretically possible' to have...
The long-awaited report by the UK's Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson on the ethical and scientific issues surrounding therapeutic cloning research was published last Wednesday. It calls for a change to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990, to allow scientists working on stem cell therapies to carry out...
A new reproductive technology is on the horizon. Egg fusion, described in this week's BioNews, could have a significant impact on the lives of many women who cannot currently conceive naturally. Apart from the women with fertility problems who might benefit from this technique, egg fusion could also be of...
A team of American scientists has produced the first non-human primate clone. Tetra, a Rhesus monkey baby, was born in September last year at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center in the US. However, the creation of Tetra was not, done by nuclear transfer as Dolly the sheep was. Instead...
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...
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