KOREA: Despite the Hwang debacle, the South Korean government is still determined to ensure that it becomes one of the world's top three powerhouses in stem cell biotechnology by 2015. This week it signed off on a plan to spend US$454 million on stem cell research. This will cover both adult and embryonic stem cells, along with strengthening ethical standards, said an official at the Ministry of Science and Technology. click here to read whole article and make comments

Canadian doctors are embracing cosmetic surgery and abandoning less lucrative fields, says the magazine Macleans. "In 15 minutes I can inject Botox and make three, four, five hundred dollars," says a Toronto dermatologist. "In the same 15 minutes I can excise a malignant melanoma and make $50." And as doctors abandon family medicine, dermatology and other specialities to provide firm, unlined, hairless skin for ageing baby-boomers, the availability of care for people who are actually sick is diminishing -- although perverse incentives created by the Canadian health care system certainly play a role in this, as well.

Whatever the reason, cosmetic medicine is becoming more and more popular with Canadian doctors. Morale is another factor. Cosmetic patients are normally happy and appreciative, while patients in a family medicine practice are cranky and sick. Cosmetic surgery is also more adventurous in terms of medical technology.

But doctors acknowledge that cosmetic medicine can be quite different from traditional medicine:… click here to read whole article and make comments

Somewhere in the US is a sperm donor who has passed a deadly gene to five children born to four couples. Writing in the Journal of Pediatrics, Dr Lawrence A. Boxer, of the University of Michigan, said that he had been consulted by the parents of a child with an extremely rare disease of the blood, severe congenital neutropenia, which is often fatal for children who are not treated. Daily shots of a drug costing US$200 a day are required to keep them in good health. Soon he found that he was treating five IVF children from the same sperm donor.

The sperm bank was unable to provide any information about the donor, but Dr Boxer suspects that he had an unusual condition, mosaicism, in which the mutant gene was carried only in the sperm and not in the rest of the body. Otherwise he would have been a very sick man -- and the sperm bank assured the researchers… click here to read whole article and make comments

A bill in the Spanish Parliament has given fresh heart to philosopher Peter Singer in his struggle to extend the basic rights of life, liberty and freedom from torture to the great apes. Francisco Garrido, a Green who belongs to the Socialist bloc in parliament, wants Spain to become the first European country to endorse Singer's ideas. He says that the great apes have a cultural level comparable to a two or three-year-old child and that humans share 98.4% of their genes with chimpanzees and 97.7% with gorillas. Singer adds out that a group of scientists proposed three years ago that chimpanzees are so close genetically that they ought to be included in the genus Homo.

Singer argues that humans have little to fear from being more open towards the great apes. They are not really needed for medical research anyway; those in zoos need not be set free; and they could be euthanased if they were suffering unbearably. Giving… click here to read whole article and make comments

 Slate's bioethics correspondent has made a scathing attack on this month's decision by the UK's fertility regulator to allow pre- implantation genetic diagnosis for flawed embryos. William Saletan says that the decision by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority shows that the "slippery slope" is a reality and that it can be measured in three ways.

The first is "penetrance", the probability that a gene will lead to a disease. The old standard was that a 90% probability would justify PGD. Now a 30-80% is enough. The second scale is treatability. The old standard was that screening was only allowed when treatments would be "awful or unreliable". But now a mere risk of failure, not a certainty of failure, is enough. The third scale is age of onset. Originally PGD was allowed only for diseases which were present in a child when it was born. Now the diseases for which PGD is allowed can show up at the age… click here to read whole article and make comments

Whether clinical drug trials should be conducted in the developing world is a thorny and intractable issue, says Slate columnist Amanda Schaffer in MIT's Technology Review. But solutions won't be found by demonising the pharmaceutical industry. Schaffer contrasts two recent reports, one in the March issue of the magazine Harper's, which suggests that drug companies are conspiring to promote toxic drugs, based on investigations into a badly-run trial for an anti-HIV drug. Overheated polemics, says Schaffer.

However, the other article, by Jennifer Kahn, in Wired (see BioEdge 194), says that India is in danger of becoming a nation of guinea pigs, because the financial incentives to participate in drug trials are too great for impoverished rural people to resist and because they tend to accept a doctor's advice without question, weakening the idea of informed consent. These are more substantial complaints, agrees Schaffer. In fact, a recent study in the journal IRB: Ethics and Human Research suggests that local ethics… click here to read whole article and make comments

Thousands of couples are travelling to clinics in the US where they can choose the sex of their next child. Dr Jeffrey Steinberg, the leading figure in American commercial sex selection, says that half of his clients come from countries where the controversial procedure is banned, such as Australia, Germany, Britain and Canada. In the United States we really guard and cherish reproductive choice and we are very reticent to allow the government to impinge on that," says Steinberg. Over the past three years he has treated 2,000 couples.

Most couples tell Steinberg that they have come to him to balance their family. "Usually these couples have four or five children of one sex and desperately want one of the opposite sex," he says. Americans and Canadians have a preference for girls; Indians and Chinese for boys; and Latin Americans are evenly split. He denies that his work represents a step towards "designer babies". click here to read whole article and make comments

A Canadian psychologist who brought a friend to an assisted suicide clinic in Zurich, where she killed herself, is being accused of serious professional misconduct. Peter Marshall declared in a letter to a newspaper that he had accompanied a disabled woman friend named Su" to a Dignitas clinic. She died in there in December 2004. Following this admission, another psychologist, Marty McKay, of Toronto, lodged a complaint with the Ontario College of Psychologists. When this was dismissed as "harassing and vexatious", she appealed to the Health Professions Appeal and Review Board. A hearing was held last week.

McKay told the board that Marshall had brought his profession into "disrepute" because "his high stature and public support for killing disabled people can reasonably be expected to have an impact." She also contended that the college failed to view her complaint as raising a "a public protection issue" because "after all, a woman is dead and members of the disabled community are… click here to read whole article and make comments

The first man in the UK to have children without a female partner has just published a second edition of his book on raising triplets on his own. Ian Mucklejohn's children, now five years old, were born to an American surrogate mother when he was 58. He recently took the boys to the US to meet their genetic mother and the woman who brought them to term.

Now 63, he told the BBC that his experience has been very positive. I have seen the unhappiness childlessness brings and this country makes it too hard to overcome that," he says. "But it can be done." He feels that the boys will not regret not having a mother because he plays both roles adequately. "I am the anchor in their lives," he says. "That's not to say having a mother isn't a great thing, but as long as I am doing my best by them I don't think they are missing… click here to read whole article and make comments

The number of eggs used by disgraced Korean stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk keeps climbing. He originally claimed that he had used only 427 eggs to produce 11 human embryonic stem cell lines. This claim has been proven fraudulent. In January, investigators from Seoul National University disclosed that he had used 2,061 eggs from 129 donors. A month later, the National Bioethics Committee found that he had gathered 2,221 eggs from 119 donors. And now police prosecutors say that the number is 2,236 eggs from 136 donors. Hwang did not act alone. It also appears that Hanyang University Medical Center gave eggs to Hwang without obtaining the consent of the donors. This was a clear violation of a Korean bioethics law. click here to read whole article and make comments