A cloned cow has given birth to a healthy female calf at the Ishikawa Prefectural Livestock Research center in northern Japan, Japanese government officials announced last week. Other cloned mammals - including Dolly the sheep - have already reproduced, but this is the first reported case of a cloned cow breeding successfully...
The results of a major new study into the causes of cancer were published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week. A team of researchers based at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, studied 44,788 sets of twins living in Sweden, Denmark and Finland to assess their lifetime risk of...
A UK scientist has attacked the government for failing to launch a national screening programme for cystic fibrosis (CF), reported the Guardian newspaper last week. Howard Cuckle, professor of reproductive epidemiology at Leeds University said: 'It's quite scandalous that there's been all this hype about the genome project and enormous...
The head of the Max Delbruck Centre for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, Germany and the president of Germany's main science funding agency have expressed concern over the awarding of broad patents on gene sequences. Detlev Ganten and Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker are urging Wolf-Michael Catenhausen, the secretary of state for research, to explore...
The European Commission has indicated it may push through a new directive governing the approval of new types of genetically modified (GM) food. The commission said the time had come to accept that GM food did not pose a serious threat to public health and that new types of GM...
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Comment
Of cancer, genes and reporting
by Dr Jess Buxton
Q:When is a genetic disease usually not an inherited disease? A:When the disease is cancer: uncontrolled cell growth caused by genetic damage acquired throughout a lifetime. Cancer, though rarely inherited, is most definitely genetic. Identifying the many genes involved (and the proteins they make) will almost certainly be...