A team of British researchers announced last week that they may have found a new source of embryonic stem cells. John Gurdon, from the Wellcome Cancer Research Institute at Cambridge University, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that he and his colleagues have found that cloned...
Severino Antinori, the maverick Italian fertility doctor who recently announced that one of his patients was pregnant with a clone, announced on an Italian chat show last week that two more women were also carrying clones. Antinori offered no details to support his claims that the three women were in...
Cancer research scientists have identified another gene that, if mutation occurs, can result in an increased risk of breast cancer. The gene, called CHEK2 or CHK2, is thought to double the 13 per cent lifetime risk of breast cancer that is faced by women in the US. The report, published...
A group of executives from biotechnology companies met with US Senators last week to urge them to support legislation allowing therapeutic cloning whilst banning the reproductive cloning of humans. The lobby group focussed its attention on the 20 or so Senators who, it is said, have not yet decided how...
Craig Venter, the scientist who led the biotechnology company Celera Genomics in its attempt to sequence the human genome, has announced that the genetic data used was largely his own. At the time, it was said that the genetic data used came from anonymous donors, and the sequence presented was...
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Ethical issues in stem cell research
by Dr Jess Buxton
In this week's BioNews we report on a new study that shows it may be possible to extract healthy stem cells from abnormal human embryos. This is good news for researchers attempting to understand how embryo stem cells develop into different body tissues. It raises the possibility that visibly abnormal...