This week's BioNews includes a story from the United States that the National Bioethics Advisory Commission is about to publish recommendations that federal funds be made available for some human embryo research. A congressional ban, in place since 1994, has meant that no federal money can be used to fund...
After six months of deliberation, a US presidential commission has decided to advise the federal government to fund some kinds of research using human embryos. A draft report of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission specifically refers to the recent breakthrough in human embryonic stem cell research, which offers the real...
This week's BioNews reports on news that the American biotech company which funded last year's stem cell breakthrough has bought the commercial arm of the Roslin Institute. With the new acquisition, the Geron Corporation will now be able to marry the nuclear transfer technology developed at Roslin with the American...
A British doctor has submitted an application to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the UK's regulatory body, to carry out embryo splitting. The notorious Paul Rainsbury, consultant gynaecologist at the BUPA Roding Hospital in Essex, argues that embryo splitting would allow a woman to increase the number of...
Federal funding for scientists wanting to carry out experiments on stem cells derived from human embryos came another step closer in the US last week. Last Thursday, a group of biologists and lawyers drafted guidelines under which stem cell research could take place. Human embryonic stem cells were successfully isolated...
The maverick Italian fertility specialist, Severino Antinori, has announced that he intends to deliver IVF millennium babies by caesarian section. Dr Antinori said last week that he had helped 14 women conceive by in vitro fertilisation techniques and said that he hoped to make the first incision within two seconds...
At a conference in London last week, Dr Anne McLaren of the Wellcome CRC Institute in Cambridge (UK) said that the first application of cloning techniques in cell therapy was likely to be for bone marrow grafts for children suffering from leukaemia. She predicted that this might be possible in...
Research using cloned human embryos should be allowed for the development of tissue and cell therapies, the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) declared in a statement released last week. The AAS statement says that because of recent breakthroughs in the isolation of embryonic stem cells and the development of cloning...
Germany's tight laws on human embryo research should remain in place for the time being, according to a policy statement issued two weeks ago by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), an agency that funds basic research in Germany. Since breakthroughs in areas such as human embryonic stem cell research which could...
An article in Newsweek discusses the ethical issues surrounding the use of cloning technology to produce embryonic stem cells capable of producing cells and tissues for transplant purposes. The writer makes a distinction between reproductive cloning and the use of cloning technology for therapeutic purposes. The Independent on Sunday deals...
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