In an address to the United Nations , US President George Bush condemned human cloning -- both reproductive and therapeutic -- as part of his nation's wide ranging defence of human dignity. "Because we believe in human dignity, we should take seriously the protection of life from exploitation under any pretext... [I] urge all governments to affirm a basic ethical principle: No human life should ever be produced or destroyed for the benefit of another."

Bush also placed the notion of human dignity at the centre of his major foreign policy initiatives -- the war on terror, a global fund to fight disease, a ban on human trafficking, debt reduction, a global peace-keeping force, and so on.

However, Mr Bush's rhetorical flourishes went unnoticed by disgruntled American scientists. A group called Scientists and Engineers for Change will be giving talks in 10 swinging states, charging that his administration has ignored and misused science. Amongst the lecturers are 10 Nobel Prize winners, including Dr Harold Varmus, for director of the National Institutes of Health.

Algerians are paying criminal gangs up to US$30,000 for Iraqi kidneys, according to an Algerian daily, La Nouvelle R�publique. However, the local kidney patients support association says that nine out of ten patients die after the operation because the organ is incompatible or because of diseases such as TB, AIDS or hepatitis.

A Florida law passed to prevent a brain-damaged woman from having her food and water withdrawn to bring about her death has been deemed unconstitutional by the state's Supreme Court. The court said on Thursday that "Terri's Law", hastily pushed through the legislature by Governor Jeb Bush last year, was "unconstitutional as a violation of separation of powers, as a violation of the right of privacy and as unconstitutional retroactive legislation".

Terri Schiavo fell unconscious after a heart attack 14 years ago. She can breath on her own, but needs to be tube-fed water and food. In the opinion of the court, "Medicine cannot cure [her] condition. Unless an act of God, a true miracle, were to recreate her brain, Theresa will always remain in an unconscious, reflexive state."

Terri's plight has created headlines as the world watches her husband, who wants to her to die, and her parents, who want to keep her alive, slug it out in the courts. For every judge he found who would allow her death, they found one who forbade it. Thursday's decision is not the end of the drama -- the case could be heard again or there could be an appeal to the US Supreme Court. Lawyers for Mrs Schiavo's parents are also trying to remove her husband as her legal guardian.

Florida's state constitution protects the right of terminally ill patients to die "with dignity". What this "dignity" implies is unclear. Mrs Schiavo's husband contends that she did not want to remain on a feeding tube and that she should be allowed to die slowly through starvation and thirst.

A Belgian team has raised hopes that women who have treatment for cancer and women who want to delay motherhood until after menopause can still become pregnant naturally. In an article in this week's issue of The Lancet Dr Jacques Donnez outlined how he froze ovarian tissue from Ouarda Touirat when she was 25 in 1997. Six years after treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma, Ms Touirat was cleared of cancer and had her tissue transplanted. Her ovarian function was restored and she became pregnant naturally.

This new technique is good news for young women with cancer. But it could also enable women to postpone child-bearing until they have established themselves in their careers -- at a time of life when their contemporaries are already grandmothers. However, a British scientist warned that the technique has limitations. Professor David Baird, of Edinburgh University, said the operation would be most useful for women with cancers which could not spread to the transplant graft. "I think it's a terrific advance, but I think it would be very easy to oversell it," he said.

An adviser on animal research for the British government has called for clearer statistics on animal experiments which can be understood by the public. Professor Michael Banner, of Edinburgh University, chairs the Animal Procedures Committee. He has complained in the London Telegraph that no one really knows how much animals suffer and how many are subjected to experiments that make them suffer. Statistics which show that there were millions of "procedures" conjure up "an image of suffering on a vast scale", he says, but in fact many of these procedures are brief and painless.

Reform the statistics' is not a cry to get the masses to the barricades, but it would help," says Professor Banner. "Where there is a lack of openness there is bound to be misunderstanding. Where there is misunderstanding there is likely to be suspicion. Where there is suspicion there is a climate in which extremism can flourish. And from any point of view, the existence of a threat of terrorism against researchers is a bad thing."

A British expert on euthanasia has called for the legalisation of euthanasia after estimating that 18,000 people are secretly killed each year by doctors. Dr Hazel Biggs, of the University of Kent, based her figures on extrapolations of figures from the Netherlands and Australia and on interviews with British doctors. What this says to me is that we know these practices are going on, but they are completely unregulated," she says. "We don't know how many people are volunteers or non-volunteers, and maybe because of that the law ought to be changed so that people can give voluntary consent, which will give them more protection." It appears that as the British population ages, more doctors are taking private decisions to speed the death of terminally ill patients, normally by increasing drug doses.

Doctors, nurses and pharmacists who have a conscientious objection to abortion, the morning-after pill or contraception are winning more support in the US Congress and in state legislatures, according to an AP report. Almost unnoticed, the US House of Representatives recently passed a provision that would prohibit local, state or federal authorities from forcing persons or institutions to provide abortions, even in cases of rape or medical emergency. Although the chance that it will survive scrutiny by the Senate is slim, some states are enacting even more liberal exemptions. Mississippi passed a law in July which allows health care workers to refuse almost any service they object to on moral or religious grounds.

Abortion supporters are alarmed. The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association recently launched a petition drive against what it calls refusal clauses". And Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood, says, "We've seen increasing organisation and networking to get more pharmacists to refuse to provide EC [emergency contraception] -- not just in the Bible Belt, but all over." She claims that "It's part of the anti-choice arrogance in which they believe they have the right to impose their ideology on everyone else."

One of Feldt's opponents, Karen Brauer, president of Pharmacists for Life, agrees that interest in "conscience clauses" is growing. She even argues that there should be no obligation to refer patients to a pro-abortion doctor. "Forced referral is stupid," she says. "If we're not going to kill a human being, we're not going to help the customer go do it somewhere else."

Life issues appear to be the most radical differences between American presidential candidates George Bush and John Kerry in their health and science policies. In analyses published by the BMJ, Nature and the BBC, the two men clashed most on abortion and stem cell research, although they also have different solutions to health coverage, climate change, GM crops and new nuclear weapons. According to BBC analyst Paul Reynolds, this represents a battle between Kerry's science and Bush's "moral fundamentalism" -- a view hotly disputed by the President's supporters.

On abortion, the Republican platform elevates embryos and foetuses to the status of citizens. It states that "we support a human life amendment to the Constitution and we endorse legislation to make it clear the 14th amendment's protections apply to unborn children." The Democrat platform supports Roe v Wade and repeats President Clinton's slogan that "abortion should be safe, legal and rare".

On stem cell research, the Republicans support Bush's compromise which allows federal funding only for research on a few dozen human embryonic stem cell lines which were created before August 2001. They also oppose cloning and the creation of human embryos. The Democrats believe that stem cell research should be supported "under the strictest ethical guidelines" because it could bring wonder cures for Alzheimer's, heart disease, Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes.

The UK lobby group GeneWatch claims that companies are preparing to market gene tests for a "susceptibility" to a disease and that this could frighten people into taking unnecessary medication. "Most claims that genes increase a person's risk of common conditions, such as heart disease, depression or obesity, later turn out to be wrong," says GeneWatch deputy director Dr Helen Wallace. "Unregulated genetic testing would mean that we could all be frightened into taking medicines for illness that we are never going to get." The UK does not require companies which market tests to confirm the link between a gene and a disease.

Critics of Italy's strict new law regulating the fertility industry are scrambling to get half a million signatures by September 30 so that they can have a referendum to scrap it. The law, which was passed only in February, bans donor sperm or eggs, surrogate motherhood, IVF for gays and single women, embryo freezing and embryo experimentation. Although many leaders of Italy's diverse political parties are backing reform, other politicians warn that a referendum could "tear the country apart".