Scientists have suggested there may be a genetic basis behind the way our body reacts to the flu virus, making some of us more vulnerable than others. A study published in PLoS Genetics has tracked the body's response to the H3N2/Wisconsin strain of the flu virus at the genetic level. The researchers injected the virus into 17 volunteers and analysed expression patterns from the time of injection to the onset of full-blown clinical symptoms...
A South African rugby player is believed to be the first in his country to receive an experimental stem cell therapy to treat a serious neurological disease....
UK scientists have, for the first time, generated live nerve cells from a patient with a rapidly progressing form of Parkinson's disease...
Over a dozen children with 'boy in bubble' syndrome are alive and well, with functioning immune systems, nine years after undergoing gene therapy to correct their disorder, researchers report....
A group of Irish scientists has discovered that a supposedly 'dead' pseudogene is, in fact, active. The gene, DHFRL1, was long thought to be inactive, however new research, published in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests this is not the case...
Cross-breeding with early humans was highly advantageous to the modern human immune system, according to a new study published in Science...
A US businesswoman from Arizona has been convicted of selling unapproved stem cells over a period of several months....
Researchers in Finland have discovered a genetic mutation potentially involved in the formation of uterine fibroids. Fibroids are the most common reason for hysterectomy, and 60 percent of women develop them before the age of 45...
The documentary 'I'm Pregnant with Their Baby' shows three women's experience of UK surrogacy. They are among a rare group who became surrogate mothers for altruistic reasons...
Forget 'you are what you eat'. Rather 'you are what your mother ate'. That is the dramatic message of the BBC's latest episode of Horizon 'The Nine Months That Made You', broadcast on Monday 22 August. The documentary was an account of the Barker Theory that birth weight determines health in later life...
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BBC documentary shows why we need UK DonorLink
by Dr Marilyn Crawshaw
A BBC1 documentary 'Donor Mum: The children I've never met' is to be broadcast at 10.35pm tonight (30 August). The programme tells the extraordinary story of a woman - herself the single mother by choice of a donor insemination-conceived adult son — meeting with the twins born from her egg donation nineteen years ago....
The certain scientist and the uncertain gene
by Aaron Parkhurst
Philosopher Langdon Winner rather poetically refers to scientific public engagement as 'technological somnambulism'. The image he invokes is that of a vast network of societal sleepwalking; interacting but not engaging. This is especially true within a biomedical context. Whenever an inventive entity creates novel technologies, he or she inspires and develops two important constructs. The first is the physical instrument, or perhaps something less concrete, such as an idea or methodology...