Earlier this month the US Food and Drug Administration shut down a North Carolina company which supplied body parts to medical schools and tissue banks because its products posed a danger to public health. Now it appears that its owner, Philip Joe Guyett Jr, is a charlatan who specialised in the industry. He had been convicted of embezzling money from the sale of a corpse in California and had a history of faking credential on resumes. Three years ago, it transpired that a leaky FedEx box containing human limbs had been shipped by him.

This is the second scandal this year in the American body parts industry. Despite Guyett's conviction, he was able to register two companies with the FDA to provide tissue for transplants. "In this business what really rules is: Do you have the goods? Can you give the body parts that I need? If you have a sketchy background, that doesn't really make a difference. People just… click here to read whole article and make comments

Futuristic and wacky they may be, but transhumanists are beginning to show up on the radar of bioethical discussion. One of the latest transhumanist visions is engineering people to be virtuous. At recent conference in Helsinki, scientists and philosophers heard one of the leading theorists, James Hughes, laud enhanced moral behaviour.

This is a possibility which Hughes, the head of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in the US, predicts will happen "in the very near future". that "we will be able to suppress unwelcome desires, enhance compassion and empathy, and expand our understanding... So, contrary to the bioconservative accusation that neurological self-determination and human enhancement will encourage more selfishness in society, it will probably permit people to be even more moral and responsible than they currently are."

Nick Bostrom, an Oxford-based transhumanist, raised the possibility of technology rescuing marriages in an interview in Nature. "An interesting possibility is the use of pharmaceuticals to regulate the pair-bonding mechanism. There… click here to read whole article and make comments

Sperm donation: The UK has effectively banned the sale of fresh sperm over the internet. All samples gathered by on-line providers must be frozen and tested for viruses before being sold. Apparently on-line sale of sperm in Britain has increased dramatically recently due to the government's decision to stop anonymous donations. click here to read whole article and make comments

The website of the shows what most voters, and not just in Missouri, expect from embryonic stem cell (ESC) research. The Coalition is battling for a referendum which will legalise therapeutic cloning. Gathered in the website's "Stories of Hope" are two dozen heart-rending accounts of children who are dying young of chronic diseases and adults whose lives have been consumed by disease and spinal cord injuries. They all conclude with a desperate plea to voters for support.

Unfortunately, according to the New York Times, embryonic stem cell therapies will be long a-coming. "Many [scientists] no longer see [embryonic] cell therapy as the first goal of the research, parting company with those whose near-term expectations for cell therapy remain high. Instead, these researchers envisage a longer-term program in which human embryonic cells would be a research tool to study the mechanisms of disease. From this, they say, many therapeutic benefits may emerge, like new drugs, which would probably be available… click here to read whole article and make comments

 Singapore is jockeying for a position as a world leader in stem cell research. Researchers disgruntled with meagre funding or restrictive regulation in their home countries are moving to the island state. Faced with declining returns in electronics, the Singaporean government declared a few years ago that biotechnology would become one of the pillars of its economy. It has invested S$500 million into a "biopolis", a huge biomedical complex with the latest equipment (including an underground facility for 250,000 mice). A stem cell bank is under way.

Giving Singapore a competitive edge in this field are extremely liberal regulations. Back in 2002, its Bioethics Advisory Council declared that "a human embryo has a special status as a potential human being, but is not of the same status as a living child or adult. Such respect is however, not absolute and may be weighed against the recognised benefits arising from the proposed research." The utilitarian stance of the government's position… click here to read whole article and make comments

What should stem cell scientists do when their moral views clash with society's? First, set up an eminent persons committee and call for consultation and communication. This is what is being proposed by the so-called Hinxton Group of about 50 scientists, ethicists, journal editors, lawyers and policy makers, in an article in the leading journal Science. These include John Harris, of Manchester University, and Julian Savulescu, of Oxford University, both regarded as radical utilitarians.

Without too much optimism, the group calls for uniform international standards in the regulation of stem cell research. More achievable, however, is stopping "extraterritorial jurisdiction" over researchers, the ability of a government to prosecute citizens for crimes" which may be legal in another country. They insist that scientists who do work which is banned at home should not be punished if they do it abroad. This is a real issue for German scientists, because the extraterritorial reach of the law is written into Germany's constitution.

In… click here to read whole article and make comments

Australian politicians are gearing up for a conscience vote on therapeutic cloning. Health minister Tony Abbott is doing his best to demonise it by raising the spectre of "human-animal hybrids" and condemning its supporters as "peddling hope". However, it is votes, not words, which will carry the day. The trouble is, what voters feel about this complex issue is itself a matter of debate. Opinion polls in Australia's public debate over therapeutic cloning have yielded very different results.

Back in June the respected Morgan poll claimed that 82% of Australians back the use of embryonic stem cells to treat diseases like heart failure and Alzheimer's. Eighty per cent favoured therapeutic cloning. However, the poll tended to overstate the possibility for cures -- especially Alzheimer's, which nearly all scientists acknowledge will not be licked with stem cells. Nor did it use the words "therapeutic cloning". Instead, the pollster described the procedure as "merging an unfertilised egg with a skin cell" without… click here to read whole article and make comments

 Conservative US Senator Sam Brownback has introduced a bill which would bar doctors from prescribing federally controlled drugs to be used in assisted suicide. This is aimed directly at Oregon, where 37 patients died legally with the help of their doctor in 2004. "When the law permits killing as a medical 'treatment', society's moral guidelines are blurred, and killing could gain acceptance as a solution for the chronically ill or vulnerable," said Brownback. He does not expect the bill to become law this year, but he wants to use it as "a rallying point for those opposed to assisted suicide." (It might also rally conservatives to his presidential ambitions.)

Predictably, the prospect of a Washington do-gooder trampling Oregon law underfoot nettled the Seattle Times. It sputtered in an editorial that the senator from Kansas was not the third senator for Oregon and should not try to lead it down "the yellow brick road of righteousness".

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A 16-year-old cancer patient in Virginia has reached an agreement with a court about how to treat his Hodgkin's disease. Abraham Cherrix and his parents were so distressed by his discomfort after one round of chemotherapy that they opted for the Hoxsey method, a type of Mexican natural medicine which most doctors regard as outright quackery. A court decided that they were being negligent -- despite Abraham's protestations that he did not want chemotherapy -- and ordered him to be treated. Now, after an appeal, a compromise has been reached: he can continue with the alternative treatment, so long as he sees a recognised cancer specialist. He will not have to have chemotherapy, but he might get radiation.

Although the case ended harmoniously, it raised thorny questions about patient autonomy, in much the same way that teenage abortions do. Does an intelligent teenager have the right to determine his own treatment and does the state or his parents have the… click here to read whole article and make comments

Lessons: Investigators into the botched UK drug trial which left six men desperately ill have released an in-depth report. The drug, TGN1412, a monoclonal antibody, caused a massive immune response which flooded the volunteers' blood with inflammatory agents and triggered organ failure. The doctors say that the drug should have been used more cautiously and that the men should have been tested at least two hours apart, rather than at 10-minute intervals. click here to read whole article and make comments