Stem cells. Poetry. Two terms seldom used together. The winning entries in a poetry competition held by California's stem cell funding body to celebrate Stem Cell Awareness Day were published last Wednesday. By Friday, the two winning poems had been pulled from the website because the language of one poem: 'introduces a religious element that we now realise was offensive to some people'...
A Vatican official has criticised the decision to award British IVF pioneer Professor Robert Edwards the Nobel Prize in Medicine, saying the choice was 'very perplexing'...
A couple from British Columbia, Canada, have been embroiled in a complex ethical battle after their surrogate refused their request to abort the fetus she was carrying. The couple made the request after tests revealed the baby would likely be born with Down's syndrome...
An international consortium has been set up to study the genetic origins of heart attack and coronary artery disease (CAD)...
Researchers in the US have shown that a gene-based test designed to predict the risk of Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) is only marginally better than existing methods....
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is considering tightening its guidelines on embryo implantation with the possibility that, in future, only single embryo transfers (SET) may be recommended....
US researchers have developed a means to predict which human embryos produced through IVF are most likely to result in healthy births. Researchers filmed 242 one-cell embryos and predicted, with more than 93 percent accuracy, those that would survive up to five days. These findings may improve the success rate of IVF....
A three-year genetics project has been launched in Birmingham to help tackle the city's high infant mortality rate by raising awareness of inherited genetic disorders...
A lesbian couple are expecting quintuplets after using a sperm donor to conceive....
It is almost a cliché to say that genetics has moved beyond the boundaries of science, penetrating social and cultural understandings of ourselves as individuals and social beings. Dr Alexandra Plows' book Debating Human Genetics is in this sense not a groundbreaking contribution. The book is the product of a three-year academic project. In it, Dr Plows approaches the social phenomena of the 'gene' by examining the ways different people or 'publics' are engaging with human genetics...
Stay up-to-date on all the latest developments in the fields of human fertility and genomics. And be the first to hear about upcoming events and other announcements.
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Thinking of delaying your family? Consider freezing your embryos
by Gillian Lawrence
When I was 30, and my husband was 32, we knew were not ready to be parents. We were not yet able to provide a child the time and financial resources we wanted for them, and did not think we would be able to do so until after I turned 35. We also knew, if we waited until our late 30s or 40s to attempt to conceive a child, we would be facing increased risks of infertility, miscarriage and genetic abnormalities...
Elusive Nobel prize finally lands!
by Professor Martin Johnson
Professor Robert Edwards was last week awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on IVF [1]. Bob might seem an obvious award candidate since IVF and related treatments are taken for granted nowadays. Most of us know family, friends and/or colleagues who have used IVF, PGD, surrogacy or gamete donation. During the lonely days of the 1960s and 70s, the situation was very different...