Doctors in Canada will consider a policy to withhold IVF to obese women at a national meeting of fertility experts this week....
An international team of scientists has identified a genetic defect responsible for familial motor neurone disease (MND). A region on chromosome 9 was found to be expanded in 40 percent of people with familial motor neurone disease. It is hoped that a blood test for this disease will be available on the NHS in the near future...
Lawyers acting for two US scientists who sought to challenge the legality of a decision by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to allow research on new embryonic stem (ES) cell lines have filed a notice of appeal. They seek to reverse the decision made against them by a district judge in July...
The Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the UK's fertility regulator, has admitted breaches of the sperm donation limit have occurred, following news that one donor has fathered 17 families...
The world's largest sperm bank, Cryos International, is turning away red-haired men as donors due to a lack of demand for their sperm. Its director, Mr Ole Schou, said the bank has reached its capacity of 70 litres of semen due to a surge in donations in recent years...
Researchers have identified a strong link between a genetic fault and two common neurological disorders. Two independent studies have found that the mutation is common in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), particularly if the disease is familial...
The success of a new gene therapy trial represents a significant step towards a 'functional cure' for HIV, US researchers announced this week. By mimicking the effects of a naturally occurring gene mutation that makes an individual resistant to infection, this therapy aims to reduce or eliminate the dependency of HIV patients on antiretroviral drugs....
UK scientists have been granted approval to begin the first clinical trial using embryonic stem cells (ES cells) in Europe, which they hope could lead to an effective treatment for a degenerative eye disease causing blindness...
Tissue engineers from the UK have, for the first time, developed an artificial fetal membrane from human stem cells to be used as a ‘repair patch' to prevent premature births...
The short film 'Stem Cell Revolutions: A Vision of the Future' uses interviews to document how stem cells have 'vitally changed our understanding of the human body'. The film opens with a voiceover by the film's celebrity commentator novelist Margaret Atwood: 'Sometimes it seems stem cells are proposed as the answer to everything... What can't they do?'...
First, here is the bad news. Readers attracted by this title are in for a stormy and depressing journey. The writing, both in choice of language and sentence construction, is turgid. The problems of 'plain English' start in the six-page introduction, reach a low point in the ethical chapter and only improve slightly in the legal section...
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Comment
Safeguarding consent and confidentiality in clinical genetic practice
by Professor Anneke Lucassen and 1 others
Suppose you have just had a genetic test for a condition that you suspect runs in your family. Aside from the possible implications for your own health, could — or should — your results be used to help to interpret tests done on other members of your family?...
Racing ahead in the polls
by Sarah Norcross
Throughout 2011 the charity that publishes BioNews, the Progress Educational Trust, has been running a Wellcome Trust supported project entitled 'Genes, Ancestry and Racial Identity: Does It Matter Where Your Genes Come From?'. The project is now concluding with an online poll which we'd like to encourage all BioNews readers to complete...