UK researchers say that an additional 10,000 cycles of IVF per year could be provided free on the National Health Service (NHS), if clinics took action to reduce the number of multiple births following IVF. It is common for women undergoing IVF to have two embryos implanted at a time...
The US state of Maryland could become the next state to publicly fund human embryonic stem (ES) cell research. Researchers in the US are prohibited from using federal funds to do work with any ES cell lines created on or after 9 August 2001, following a declaration by President Bush...
UK researchers are seeking permission to use rabbit eggs to create human stem cells for studying motor neurone disease. Professor Chris Shaw, of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and Professor Ian Wilmut, who led the Edinburgh University team that created Dolly the sheep, are discussing their planned experiments with...
Scientists in Taiwan have created the world's first fully fluorescent green, transgenic piglets. The researchers hope the pigs will prove useful in monitoring and tracing changes in tissue during normal development, and also that the work will help boost the island's stem cell research aspirations. Professor Wu Shinn-Chih of the...
Australian scientists have identified a gene that could be involved in up to ten per cent of cases of bipolar disorder - a type of mental illness formerly known as manic depression. The research, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, pinpoints a gene called FAT-1, which makes a crucial brain...
US scientists have shown that the genetic fault underlying sickle cell disease can be corrected in embryonic stem (ES) cells derived from mouse embryos with the disorder. The team, based at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), derived ES cell lines from affected embryos, and managed to replace the...
The panel investigating the work of South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang has reported that further research published by his team was faked. The scientists, based at Seoul National University (SNU), claimed in 2004 that they had created the world's first embryonic stem (ES) cell line from a cloned human...
Join our list to stay up-to-date on all the latest developments in the fields of human fertility and genomics.
Comment
Infertility treatment in the UK: Implementing the NICE guidelines
by Professor William Ledger
Many years ago the then Minister of Health, Frank Dobson, drew attention to the unfairness of the 'postcode lottery' of provision of infertility treatments in the UK. Following his initiative, a subsequent Minister, Alan Milburn, later commissioned the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) to look into this...