The Department of Health has launched an inquiry after reports last week that frozen embryos have gone missing at two UK fertility clinics. Ten couples attending the North Hampshire Hospital have been affected, but no figures are yet available for the nearby private Hampshire Clinic, which shares its storage facilities...
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has called for a moratorium on germline gene therapy - treating diseases by altering the genetic information in the egg, sperm or embryo. Changing the human genome in ways that could be passed on from one generation to the next would be...
A team of Italian researchers has shown that neural stem cells - cells that normally develop into a range of nerve cells - can grow into muscle cells. The team, based at the Institute for Stem Cell Research in Milan, published their findings in the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience. The scientists...
A team of researchers based at the University of Hawaii has shown that the ageing process is not accelerated in successive generations of cloned mice. Earlier studies carried out on Dolly the sheep indicated that cloned animals might age prematurely. But the US scientists, who published their results in last...
Researchers at the University of Florida (UF) Genetics Institute are developing the US's first benchmark supply of a gene therapy treatment, in an effort to standardise safety data from different gene therapy experiments. The scientists have developed a batch of adeno-associated virus (AAV), a type of gene delivery system (vector...
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Frozen embryo mix-up is not a disaster for IVF
by Juliet Tizzard
This week's news that a number of frozen embryos stored in two UK IVF clinics have gone missing could be a disaster for the couples involved. If the embryos don't turn up - which they may well do - those couples will have to start their IVF treatment from scratch if they...