The European parliament last week emphatically rejected a call for a ban on all forms of human cloning and and end to European funding of experiments on human embryos. MEPs voted overwhelmingly to throw out the controversial Fiori Report on Human Genetics in Modern Medicine following debates and votes on...
The two-clause Human Reproductive Cloning Bill was last week backed by UK members of parliament, despite some strong complaints about how fast the bill passed through its stages. The bill, which prohibits the implantation of a cloned human embryo into a woman, passed all of its stages in the House...
US President George W Bush immediately condemned last week's announcement by a Massachusetts biotechnology company that it had created the world's first cloned human embryo, saying that the breakthrough was 'morally wrong' and that 'we should not as a society grow life to destroy it'. The White House called for...
A study in this week's British Medical Journal (BMJ) has found that infertility clinics are 'biased' against patients with HIV. All 75 clinics that provide assisted conception services across the UK were questioned about their policies regarding treatment of HIV positive patients. Fifty-seven of the clinics surveyed responded to the...
Gavin Mellor, the prison inmate who requested the Home Secretary to allow him access to fertility treatment in order that he would be able to artificially inseminate his wife, has lost his appeal case at the House of Lords. Mellor, who is serving a life sentence for murder at Nottingham...
Doctors at Midland Fertility Services in Birmingham, UK, have achieved a pregnancy using a human egg that had been frozen. This is the first time that such a technique has been successful in the UK, although it has worked in Singapore and Australia over a decade ago, but with very...
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Should HIV positive people get IVF?
by Juliet Tizzard
A short paper in this week's British Medical Journal (BMJ) suggests that UK IVF clinics are discriminating against HIV positive men and women. A spokesman for the Terrence Higgins Trust, a UK AIDS charity, was quick to agree: 'We do not know on what grounds these clinics are refusing to...