A 62-year old woman has become the UK's oldest woman to give birth to a child. Dr Patricia Rashbrook, who already has three children aged 18, 22 and 26, underwent IVF treatment using donor eggs in order to conceive her son, who was born by...
Louise Brown, the world's first test tube baby, is expecting her own child. Now aged 27, Louise was born after the first successful IVF treatment on 25 July 1978 - now she and her husband, Wesley Mullinder, are preparing for their first baby in January. The couple...
This week has seen the tenth anniversary of the birth of Dolly, the world's first cloned animal, in research that the journal Science referred to as the world's greatest scientific breakthrough. Before Dolly was created in 1996, animals had been cloned from embryonic cells in a method...
A team from the Institute of Cancer Research in London have found that women carrying a faulty version of the gene ATM, a DNA repair gene, have an increased risk of contracting breast cancer. They found that the risk rises from one in 12 in the general...
Human T-cells, a vital component of the immune system, have been successfully differentiated from embryonic stem cells (ES cells) for the first time. The work shows that it may be possible in the future to utilise ES cells to help fight diseases affecting the immune system such as...
A collaboration between mathematicians and scientists working on circadian rhythms has led to a controversial finding that the widely researched tau mutation speeds up rather than inhibits the underlying gene activity. Discovery of the tau mutation in hamsters, affecting the gene casein kinase 1 epsilon (CK1), was...
US scientists have discovered that a key gene could trigger the mental impairment and early onset Alzheimer's disease associated with Down syndrome. The findings, reported in two papers published in the journal Neuron, show that the over-production of a gene involved in nerve growth can kill...
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Ten years after Dolly: Hype, hope and reality
by Roger Highfield
Cloning Discovery Has Unleashed a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing'; 'Cloned Sheep in Nazi Storm' and 'Dolly Opens Door for Life After Death' were among the headlines to appear in the acres of newsprint inspired by Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. The cover of the...
Defining the human embryo: A way with words?
by Professor Martin Johnson
In February this year, the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (1) published a discussion paper entitled: 'Human Embryo - A biological definition'. This publication provides an authoritative and comprehensive summary of the scientific arguments and experiments that bear on our understanding of what a human embryo is and is...