The Italian Senate has passed a bill governing assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), said to be the most restrictive in Europe. Parliamentarians voted 169-90 in favour of the bill, the first that the country has passed in this area. Italian lawmakers, while debating the new law, were concerned that Italy...
The European Parliament (EP) has today adopted a directive setting high quality and safety standards for the therapeutic use of human tissues and cells throughout the European Union (EU). The aim of the 'tissue directive' is to establish a Europe-wide standard of quality and safety for the donation, procurement, testing...
The lower house of the French government has passed a draft bill that would prohibit all forms of human cloning. The proposed law, if passed by the upper house, would make reproductive cloning a 'crime against humanity' and subject to imprisonment for up to 30 years and a fine of...
US scientists have unveiled the entire genetic code of our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee. Teams at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and the Washington University School of Medicine took less than a year to churn through the three billion DNA base-pairs (chemical letters) that make up the...
Researchers from the Children's Hospital Boston/Harvard Medical School and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts, US, have created sperm from stem cells and used these cells to fertilise an egg. Their research, which took place in mice, was published in the 10 November online edition of the...
Raj and Shahana Hashmi, the couple who fought to be able to create a 'saviour sibling' for their son Zain, have suffered a further blow. Shahana, who had succeeded in becoming pregnant after using IVF treatment with embryo tissue typing, unfortunately suffered a miscarriage of the pregnancy. The procedure was...
The United Nations will reconsider a treaty to ban human cloning in one year's time, rather than the two-year delay agreed upon by its legal committee recently. The General Assembly arrived at the consensus this week, following a last minute plan by supporters of a total ban on cloning technology...
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Dangerous laws that compromise patient safety
by Juliet Tizzard
This week's BioNews reports a vote in the European Parliament today which will result in a new EU Directive on the use of human tissues and cells in treatment. The good news is that, after lengthy discussions between the decision-making bodies within the European Union, a compromise deal has been...