HWANG: Disgraced South Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk is suing Seoul National University to get his job back. He claims that he was unfairly dismissed based on an "inaccurate and false" investigation of his faked research. He says that the university's decision shattered both his career and the hopes of many people who looked to him for medical advances. click here to read whole article and make comments

AUSTRALIAN SENATE PASSES CLONING BILL

  By a vote of 34 to 32, the upper house of the Australian parliament has opened the door to the legalisation of therapeutic cloning. A private member's bill appears likely to pass in the House of Representatives as well, although possibly with amendments. One of the leading lobbyists for cloning, Professor Bernie Tuch, of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, to the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy -- not the most felicitous of analogies, perhaps, but an indication of how momentous the decision is for the IVF industry and stem cell scientists. "Reason has prevailed," he says.

The bill's critics saw things differently. In an emotional debate about potentiality, 34 senators discerned this elusive quality in the promises of miracle technology but failed to see it in human embryos. The bill's opponents appealed to their colleagues' sense of consistency: little had changed in the basic science,… click here to read whole article and make comments

Has the journal Science put its foot in it again? On October 27 it issued an alert that a paper on early embryological development "may not be reliable". This was a warning that it had made only once before -- about the faked research by disgraced Korean stem cell research Hwang Woo-suk. The author of the paper, which was published back in February, is an expert in reproductive biology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, R. Michael Roberts.

According to the university's vice-chancellor for research, Robert Hall, someone involved with the project might have digitally altered as many as eight images in the Science article. There were three co-authors with Roberts, but all of them have left the university. The university is conducting an inquiry. click here to read whole article and make comments

British soldiers, police, firemen and footballers are being targeted as potential sperm donors as the fertility industry scrambles to top up its dwindling stocks. Now that donor anonymity has been abolished in the UK, nearly all IVF clinics are reporting shortages, according to the Independent newspaper. In Scotland there is only one donor. As well, the quality of sperm appears to be falling, so out of 100 men interested in donating, only five will have sperm healthy enough to use. The National Gamete Donation Trust, a government-funded body for recruiting donors, says that it would like to target places where "men congregate", such as rugby matches and army bases.

There are other initiatives, too. Care, Britain's biggest chain of IVF clinics, will be marketing sperm sharing: a free cycle of IVF treatment worth US$4,750 to a couple if the man agrees to become a sperm donor. Of course, even if his wife's treatment is unsuccessful, he still faces the… click here to read whole article and make comments

Sex selection 1: undercover reporters from the Sunday Times newspaper have found that a prominent IVF specialist in London is sending patients to Cyprus so that they can choose the sex of their baby, at a cost of up to ?12,000. Sex selection for "family balancing" is illegal in Britain -- and it turns out that it is illegal in Cyprus as well. Cypriot authorities are investigating whether criminal charges should be laid. The Sunday Times also revealed that Rainsbury's partner in Cyprus, the well-known Dr Panos Zavos, was also offering sex selection -- but he was prepared to undercut him by ?3,000. click here to read whole article and make comments

 The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has been holding its annual meeting in New Orleans -- always a reliable source of choke- on-your-Cheerios articles for newspapers around the world. This year the journal Nature even dispatched a reporter, Helen Pearson, who blogged her way through the "strange stuff that doctors do with embryos" throughout the week.

The most widely reported news from this year's conference was that women who wait until later in life to have children may risk damaging the fertility of their daughters. Although the study at an IVF clinic in Atlanta involved only 74 women, it raises the troubling possibility that the trend of women waiting until their late 30s to conceive may increase the infertility of the next generation.

"A mother's reproductive age is important not only for herself, but it will determine to a certain extent the chances of her daughter or daughters being infertile," said Dr Peter Nagy, of Reproductive Biology… click here to read whole article and make comments

Here are a few more highlights from the New Orleans meeting:
Fifteen minutes watching a medical clown after an IVF cycle bumps pregnancy rates up from 20% to 36%, according to an Israeli doctor. Shevach Friedler, who is also a trained mime, says that dressing like a chef works better than wearing a red nose. click here to read whole article and make comments

Another report on the legalisation of therapeutic cloning for the Australian Parliament, written this time by a Senate committee, has split on the issue. By a vote of 5 to 3, a committee backed a private member's bill which will be decided on a conscience vote. The majority basically endorsed all the recommendations of last December's Lockhart Review. These include, either explicitly or implicitly, therapeutic cloning, hybrid embryos, creating embryos with genetic material from more than two people, the use of surplus IVF embryos, a new definition of a human embryo, and the possibility of harvesting eggs from cadavers or aborted female foetuses.

The Australian newspaper predicts that the issue will be decided by a close vote -- about 55 per cent for, 45 per cent against -- perhaps as early as next week. There has been intense lobbying for and against the bill. click here to read whole article and make comments

More and more American celebrities are weighing into the stem cell debate as election day draws closer on November 7. In Missouri, St Louis Cardinals pitcher Jeff Suppan starred in an aired during Game 4 of baseball's World Series. He was expressing his opposition to an amendment to the Missouri constitution which would allow therapeutic cloning. Joining him were former Rams quarterback Kurt Warner, Mike Sweeney of the Kansas City Royals, actress Patricia Heaton and actor Jim Caviezel. In the ad, Suppan says, "Amendment 2 claims it bans human cloning, but in the 2,000 words you don't read, it makes cloning a constitutional right. Don't be deceived."

Suppan's ad was a response to a powerful and controversial , who has early-onset Parkinson's disease and endorses embryonic stem cell research as a way of finding a cure. It is painful to watch Fox make his point as his head and limbs jerk spasmodically. "Senator Talent [the Republican incumbent] even wanted… click here to read whole article and make comments

A Taiwanese couple in their 80s who have been caring for their blind and paralyzed daughter for 53 years have insisted that they would never consider euthanasia. No matter how hard their job is, Lin Ting-chih, 81, and her husband Chiang Yu-chao, 82, plan to soldier on. "We will not let someone else look after her," says the wife. We will care for her ourselves and eventually see who is going to fall first."

Their daughter, Chiang Yu-chao, became paralysed shortly after her first birthday and became blind at six. She has never been exposed to sunlight. Her bones have become so brittle that the couple must take extreme care in turning her and cleaning her. Although there is a movement in Taiwan for euthanasia in such cases, Lin says: "No way. I will not let that happen to my daughter." click here to read whole article and make comments