Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, underwent emergency surgery for an ectopic pregnancy last week. An ectopic pregnancy is when a fetus implants and develops outside of the uterus, usually in one of the fallopian tubes. As a result, one of the Countess' tubes had to be removed. She and her...
A US Senate panel has been told that Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), the Massachusetts biotechnology firm which recently announced that it had cloned a human embryo, might be in a position to extract stem cells from cloned embryos within six months. Michael West, president of ACT, said that this would...
The entire scientific archive of Francis Crick - one of the two British men who discovered the double-helical structure of DNA - is to be displayed in London. The Wellcome Trust has bought the archive, which includes letters, research papers and laboratory notebooks, for £1.8 million. Francis Crick was negotiating with a...
Chinese scientists have made progress in stem cell research by successfully curing a partially paralysed mouse. The mouse was injected four months ago with nerve stem cells derived from a human embryo. The mouse had lost the function of its back legs and the ability to urinate after a vertebrate...
Researchers working at the Breakthrough Tony Robins Breast Cancer Research Centre believe that it may one day be possible to take a 'genetic fingerprint' of all breast cancer tumours. This would mean that treatment can be directed specifically at individuals. The scientists believe that by seeing which genes are activated...
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The royal media circus
by Juliet Tizzard
BioNews readers from outside the United Kingdom may be perplexed to read the reams of British press coverage of Sophie, Countess of Wessex's, ectopic pregnancy. After all, one in every 100 pregnancies is ectopic; so Sophie is hardly unusual, in this respect at least. Intense media interest in all things...