A report to the Australian Prime Minister and his Cabinet could undercut the support of some parliamentarians for the legalisation of therapeutic cloning. The engine for legislative change is a review published late last year by the Lockhart Committee. This argued strongly for therapeutic cloning, a redefinition of the human embryo, hybrid stem cells and other innovations. Members of the committee and supporters of therapeutic cloning have insisted that their review was objective, independent and unbiased and ought to be accepted by Parliament.

However, in an apparent attempt to blindside supporters, a report was commissioned by the Prime Minister from a Canberra consulting group. It was asked to assess whether scientific advances warranted changing the 2002 law. This piece of legislation was passed after a long, emotional and exhausting debate across party lines -- and Prime Minister John Howard obviously does not care to have this repeated. The report, submitted in June, but released to the public only recently,… click here to read whole article and make comments

Dutch authorities are alarmed by the discovery that a group of high school girls had egged each other on to commit suicide with macabre emails and text messages. "Who dares to?" was one of the SMSs. A local newspaper revealed that a dozen 12 to 15-year-old girls had been harassing each other. The group's activities began in March after one of their friends did kill herself. A lecturer in child psychiatry at Utrecht University, Hermann van Engeland, says that talking about suicide somehow raises its status amongst youth. "We don't know why," he said.

However, American columnist Colleen Carroll Campbell asserts that she knows why. She blames it on the legalisation of euthanasia in the Netherlands. "The radical and sweeping embrace of suicide as an answer to the problem of human suffering, and the elevation of euthanasia to the status of a basic human right, has convinced Dutch teenagers that suicide must be a noble act, the kind that wins… click here to read whole article and make comments

Euthanasia is back in the Australian headlines again. This time a maverick parliamentarian in South Australia has used parliamentary privilege to deliver a speech detailing how to commit suicide. Sandra Kanck ignored advice from the state's chief psychiatrist who had pleaded with her not to proceed. The state Premier, Mike Rann, called her decision "distressing and unforgivable" and took the unprecedented step of expunging her speech from the parliamentary record.

Although it is now illegal in Australia to disseminate suicide information through the internet, Ms Kanck's speech was immediately made available on a New Zealand website by euthanasia activist Dr Philip Nitschke. In any case, it was basically a promotion of his methods of committing suicide. Nitschke's new book on suicide methods, The Peaceful Pill Handbook, will be released soon.

click here to read whole article and make comments

A small US biotech's claim in the journal Nature that it had found a way to obtain "ethical" embryonic stem cells is looking more and more like a shabby attempt to grab headlines. Two American newspapers dug further into details of the embarrassing incident.

An article by Dr Robert Lanza, of Advanced Cell Technology, had claimed that a cell biopsied from an eight-cell human embryo could develop into embryonic stem cell lines without harming the embryo itself. However, it transpired that none of the embryos had actually survived his experiment. Nature, whose press release declared that the embryos had been left "intact", was forced to issue two "clarifications" and to post supplementary data on its website. The main conclusions of Lanza's paper are not disputed, but Nature may edit his abstract for greater clarity.

Lanza explained the confusion to the Philadelphia Inquirer by arguing that it was well-known from IVF procedures that 8-celled embryos could survive a biopsy. It was… click here to read whole article and make comments

Teenagers are to be discouraged from getting cosmetic surgery in New South Wales, after Premier Morris Iemma discovered that a recent contestant on Australia's version of Big Brother appeared with breast implants. "As a parent of a young daughter, I have become increasingly concerned that society's obsession with the perfect female body is influencing too many, too young," he said. The Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported that most Australian plastic surgeons would not operate on schoolgirls, but they conceded that there were "cowboys" who would. One surgeon said that he had received emails from girls as young as 13 pleading to have surgery. click here to read whole article and make comments

With perhaps 100 million species of living organisms on Planet Earth, the tree of life might seem full to bursting. But not to some scientists. Specialists in the infant field of synthetic biology want to assemble new species from bio-bricks much as children build machines with Lego. Potentially such "devices" could be very useful in health, clean and renewable energy, and the environment. And potentially they could be very useful to malicious bio-hackers or political terrorists, as well. The risks in the new science are forcing scientists to work out a code of ethics.

Such is the promise of synthetic biology that billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has invested millions of dollars into a project to defeat malaria. Jay Keasling, of the University of California, Berkeley, is trying to redesign an antimalarial drug called artemisinin by building a metabolic pathway into yeast cells so that they can synthesise a chemical which currently is available only in a Chinese herbal remedy.… click here to read whole article and make comments

OBESITY AND IVF: Severely obese women should be denied access to free fertility treatment, the British Fertility Society said recently. Women with a body mass index of 29 or more should be advised to diet and exercise, and those with a BMI of 36 or more should not be treated. click here to read whole article and make comments

History or hype? This was the question swirling about the widely publicised announcement by a Massachusetts company that it had mastered a technique for creating "ethical" embryonic stem cells which could break the logjam in America's stem cell politics. Nature rushed its article into an on-line express edition. "We have demonstrated, for the first time, that human embryonic stem cells can be generated without interfering with the embryo's potential for life," said lead author Robert Lanza.

The CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, William Caldwell, : "we do not destroy the embryo. That's the whole purpose of what we perceive to be a major scientific breakthrough." Ronald Green, a bioethicist at Dartmouth who heads ACT's Ethics Advisory Board, gave it his imprimatur. "This technique overcomes this [ethical] hurdle and has the potential to play a critical role in the advancement of regenerative medicine."

However, after Richard Doerflinger, of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, -- to say nothing… click here to read whole article and make comments

Some Israeli women are taking advantage of liberal abortion laws to sex-select their babies. An article in the latest issue of the Israel Medical Association Journal analysed statistics which suggest that many women who ask for prenatal tests for Down Syndrome really want to know the sex of their child. If the child is of the wrong sex, they abort it.

This is illegal in Israel whose law does not permit the abortion of healthy children. Dr Morechai Halperin, an ethicist at the health ministry said that he was shocked. "Killing healthy foetuses because families have 'too many' of that sex is immoral, violates universal ethics and indicates moral decline. And public money used for performing [prenatal tests] in these cases could otherwise have been used to treat cancer patients, for example." click here to read whole article and make comments

 If you are seeking bioethics at the coalface, London's Daily Mail is the newspaper for you. Its in-depth interviews with colourful personalities whose lives have been shaped by innovations in reproductive technology are always revealing.

A , surrogate mother of seven -- perhaps eight if she fails to conquer her self-confessed "addiction" to pregnancy. Ms Hawkins is a 42-year-old, often-depressed, never- married legal secretary, who lives alone in a flat with three cats and dreams of being thin. After reading about surrogacy in a women's magazine 15 years ago, she had her first baby, with artificial insemination. She loved being pregnant, she says, because "you are allowed to be fat when you are carrying a baby".

But back in 2004, after her sixth baby, disgusted with her obesity, she took an overdose. When she recovered she had an expensive gastric bypass operation which helped her to slim down. Now she hopes that the fee for her seventh… click here to read whole article and make comments