The Department of Health announced last Friday that it would be accepting recommendations made in a review of consent to the storage and use of human sperm and eggs. The review was conducted by Sheila McLean, professor of Law and Ethics in Medicine at the University of Glasgow and recommended...
US scientists led by a team from the University of California, San Diego, and the Salk Institute are hoping to sequence the chimpanzee genome in an effort to understand why humans and not chimps are affected by certain diseases. In a letter to the journal Science, an interdisciplinary group including...
Bill Clinton has announced that American scientists will be able to conduct federally funded research into human embryonic stem cells. Clinton's announcement follows a review by his administration of guidelines issued by the National Institutes of Health this week. Any work carried out on embryo stem cells will have to...
Two male dwarf Nigerian goats that have had spiders' genes transplanted into them have been bred with a herd of females. The female offspring of the herd is set to 'make scientific history' because they should produce milk that contains a super-rich 'spider fibre'. It is thought that this fibre...
The first evidence of the existence of pheromones has been found by scientists. The sex chemicals are said to form part of an inbuilt communication system between men and women, but so far, isolating the elusive chemicals has proved impossible. Published in the journal Nature Genetics, the study was based...
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New law on posthumous fathers will not mean another Diane Blood case
by Juliet Tizzard
The UK government last week announced its intention to allow children conceived after the death of their biological father to have him named on their birth certificate. This will be welcome news to one particular woman, Diane Blood, whose son was conceived after her husband died from meningitis in 1994...