Over 100 anti-abortionist campaigners in the US - led by Senator Sam Brownback (Republican, Kansas) and organised by the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity in Illinois - released a statement arguing that human embryonic stem cell research is scientifically unnecessary and urging Congress to fund alternative work. The statement was released...
Couples who have surplus embryos after undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment may be able to put them up for 'adoption' if a scheme currently being piloted in the US is set up over here. British fertility specialists indicated that a national registry of embryos would be extremely useful for...
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...
The UK's biotechnology industry was presented with a draft code of best practice to which it is expected to subscribe from the end of October. Drawn up by the BioIndustry Association (BIA) in response to the controversies at British Biotech and other drug development firms, the code requires biotech firms...
A fertility test that measures the viability of eggs in a woman's ovaries may soon give women the ability to tell the time on the proverbial biological clock. The test is the result of six years of work by Oxford scientists who discovered that levels of the hormone, inhibin B...
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What's wrong with selecting embryos?
by Juliet Tizzard
This week's BioNews includes news from the United States that a New York fertility clinic has started an 'embryo adoption' scheme. The scheme has sparked controversy because the embryos available for donation are catalogued according to the physical and intellectual attributes of their genetic parents. Another apparent eyebrow-raiser is that...