Italians are debating their strict new IVF law after it had unforeseen consequences for a 26-year-old Sicilian woman. Pregnant with triplets after an IVF procedure, her life was declared to be "at risk" by her doctor and she had a "foetal reduction" to abort one of the children. This is the second instance of foetal reduction since the law came into effect in March. The law, passed after years without regulation, stipulates that only stable, heterosexual couples of child-bearing age can receive treatment. They can only have a maximum of three embryos created and all embryos have to be implanted.

Critics law are now calling for the law to be changed. "These cases show what is wrong with this law," said the doctor who did both cases, Giovanni Monni. "It was created to protect the embryo, but what it does is force the woman to choose abortion."

An exchange in the letters column of the leading journal Nature raises interesting points about whether scientists should worry about the message or the facts when they talk to the media. In January Nature published an article by a group of conservationists which predicted that many species would become extinct by 2050. Its argument was complex and used hard-to-understand statistics. Many articles in the media were wildly distorted. Most of them blared that a million or more species would become extinct by 2050. These exaggerated claims were subsequently taken up by some politicians and conservationists.

The solution of some Oxford scientists was to restrict press releases to research papers which present "clear and unequivocal findings" and for scientists to actively seek to clarify bad reporting in the press.

Two of the original authors responded to this suggestion. Blocking publicity, they argued, would have meant a lost opportunity. Exaggerations were actually a godsend in communicating an important message to millions of Americans, even if the facts were wrong. "Breaking through a US media climate often dominated by news of war, terror or the latest celebrity escapades is a victory.... although the reporting wasn't perfect, we believe the benefits of the wide release greatly outweighed the negative effects of errors in reporting."

One of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies is being investigated by federal prosecutors in Boston for paying doctors large sums to prescribe its drugs. According to an investigative report by the New York Times, Schering-Plough sent some doctors unsolicited cheques ranging from at least US$10,000 to six-figure sums in exchange for a "consulting" agreement which involved little more than prescribing its drugs. The government is also looking into allegations that Shering-Plough "flooded the market with pseudo- trials". Doctors would receive US$1,000 to US$1,500 per patient for prescribing Intron A, the company's hepatitis C treatment. But unlike most medical trials, the patients or their insurers paid for the very expensive drug themselves.

Over the past two years, Schering-Plough has set aside US$500 million to cover its legal problems, including allegations of offering improper financial incentives. Company officials say that the alleged activities took place before its new CEO, Fred Hassan, took charge and that it has revised its marketing strategies to eliminate financial inducements. Schering-Plough also manufactures the controversial morning-after pill, Postinor-2.

A prominent Federal MP has compared some medical research in Australian universities with that done in Nazi death camps. Addressing a Right to Life conference in Melbourne, Chris Pyne said that the moral vacuum of concentration camps, which set no value on human life, foreshadowed 21st Century utilitarian medicine. Mr Pyne, a South Australian Liberal who is parliamentary secretary for family and community services, singled out human embryonic stem cell research for special criticism.

"The claims made for embryo stem cell research, puffed shamelessly in recent days by the press, are by and large immune to moral scrutiny," he said. "The merest suggestion that a disease may one day be cured is, it seems, enough to ward off any kind of criticism as reactionary and obscurantist."

The CEO to the National Stem Cell Centre, Dr Hugh Niall, dismissed Mr Pyne's blast. "Stem cell research is conducted under strict supervision and in accordance with legislation which reflects overall community standards," he told The Age.

The controversial utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer has given more ammunition to his critics by firmly endorsing infanticide in a UK newspaper. In an interview with a UK newspaper, The Independent, Singer, now a professor at Princeton University, explains why.

"All I say about severely disabled babies is that when a life is so miserable it is not worth living, then it is permissible to give it a lethal injection. These are decisions that should be taken by parents -- never the state -- in consultation with their doctors."

In any case, he says, this is already happening. "What do people think amniocentesis and the selective abortion of Down's Syndrome foetuses are? All I am saying is, why limit the killing to the womb? Nothing magical happens at birth... Of course, infanticide needs to be strictly legally controlled and rare -- but it should not be ruled out, any more than abortion."

In the interview he also describes his philosophy of "preference utilitarianism" and touches upon why he allowed his mother to be nursed until she died a natural death -- even though she was badly affected by Alzheimer's disease.

Many general practitioners are killing or hastening the deaths of their patients, according to an anonymous survey in the New Zealand Medical Journal. Thirty-nine of 693 GPs had performed "some kind of action which would conform to everyday concepts of physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia". In 380 cases, action was taken without consulting the patient, rendering the action "legally dubious", according to the authors of the survey, even if the patient had been too ill to respond. But in 88 of these cases, there had been no discussion even though the patient was competent.

Like similar surveys in other countries, the NZ study depicts a situation in which many doctors are said to be reluctantly breaking the law, leading to secrecy and psychological stress.

In another development in NZ, euthanasia campaigner Lesley Martin, who is serving 15 months' jail for the attempted murder of her dying mother in 1999, was told that she would not be allowed to serve her time in home detention. The Parole Board said that she should stay in jail unless she admits that she was wrong to break the law.

UK scientists are soon to apply for a licence to screen IVF embryos for breast and bowel cancer genes so that parents will not place their children at risk of suffering from these diseases in later life. "The whole idea is to select the embryo that doesn't have the gene so the woman can start their pregnancy knowing the baby is safe," said Dr Paul Serhal, of University College London Hospital.

The idea was immediately savaged by Josephine Quintavalle, of Comment on Reproductive Ethics. "By the time these embryos have reached the age when they are at risk of breast cancer, medical science will have advanced 30 years and we may even have a cure," she said. "What we are doing here is getting away from the concept of curing disease and towards eliminating the person with the disease."

Dr Serhal responded that "I disagree with Mickey Mouse people saying it is meddling with nature. It is simply a selection process to try to get rid of these genetic diseases."

A Los Angeles museum is displaying the controversial "Body Worlds" exhibition of Dr Gunther von Hagens. More than 200 human specimens, about 25 of them whole bodies, have been flayed and then preserved with a special "plastination" technique. Then they are posed like anatomical mannequins -- a man playing chess with a brain exposed, a man striding a rearing horse, a woman and her baby in the eighth month of pregnancy and so on.

Since the grotesque exhibits began, 14 million people have viewed them in Europe and Asia. About 6,000 people have agreed to donate their bodies as future specimens -- although most of these are still alive. Dr von Hagens operates three facilities where the bodies are preserved in his native Germany and in China and Kyrgyzstan. Each whole body specimen requires up to 1,500 hours of work to preserve, usually over 8 to 12 months. The process costs between US$35,000 and $45,000 for each body.

A white woman who unwittingly became a surrogate mother for a black couple has settled for an undisclosed amount with a New York IVF clinic. In 1998, Central Park Medical Services transferred embryos originating with Donna and Richard Fasano into her womb, along with embryos belonging to a black couple, Deborah Perry-Rogers and Robert Rogers. Initially, when Mrs Fasano gave birth to a black boy and a white boy, she did not want to give up the black child, even though his genetic mother, Mrs Perry-Rogers, had failed to become pregnant from her own IVF treatment. After five months she did give him up, but then the black couple reneged on a visitation agreement. Ever since, the case has been in the courts, first over custody arrangements and now over the responsibility of the clinic. A lawsuit brought by the black couple goes to trial in September.

And in the UK, a government investigator has concluded that human error, overwork and poor management led to mixed-race twins being born to a white couple a couple of years ago. Professor Brian Toft, who led the inquiry, also slated the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for a "culture of secrecy" and the government for underfunding the HFEA. Although the HFEA says that similar accidents are unlikely to happen, it reported that there still had been 22 "potential events" at IVF clinics in the six months up to March 2004.