In Britain, the Conservative Party has challenged the government to block lesbian couples from receiving IVF treatment unless they can provide a ‘male role model’ for their child. This is part of a proposed amendment to the human fertilisation and embryology bill which is currently before the parliament. Such a change would be a very bad idea.
There has been an increasing buzz in the papers regarding the impending launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Some of this concerns the possibility that it will lead to a disaster which destroys the world. This certainly sounds unlikely, and people who seriously suggest this are typically brushed aside with official calculations about the chance that the LHC will indeed destroy the world in any of the ways that have been suggested. For example, it is said that the chance of it destroying the earth though the creation of a particle called a strangelet is only about 1 in 50 million and the chance of it creating a black hole which does not evaporate is much less than this. However, these are not the probabilities we are looking for.
Read More »These are not the probabilities you are looking for
Science constantly gives rise to new information, new technologies, and new ethical dilemmas. To keep abreast of such changes, we need good science reporting in the newspapers, television and online. However there is a fundamental disconnect between the way science works and the way the media works which leads to big problems in mainstream science reporting. This is excellently illustrated by two of today’s news stories.
The US government has just announced that it is likely to close its enormous Pacific salmon fishery, which stretches across 80% of the USA’s west coast. The once vast salmon stocks have crashed and are now at a mere 6% of the long-term average. Many readers will remember the similar crash in the cod stocks off the east coast of Canada in the early 90s which led to great economic hardship in the area. The cause of both incidents is the same: overfishing. The Canadian and US fishing industries destroyed these vast renewable resources and in doing so have probably killed their very own geese of the golden eggs.
Alcohol abuse in the UK has been escalating for decades, contributing to crime, unemployment, illness and death. Last month, the government reported that alcohol-related deaths in the UK have doubled over the last 15 years to almost 9,000. One prominent factor in these increases is the price of alcohol, which has remained relatively stable despite increases in income over the years, and has thus become much cheaper in real terms. The cheaper it is, the more of it people consume, and the more ill effects are felt. The British Medical Association has thus called on the government to prohibit the cheap sale of alcohol, and in a surprising turn of events, the dominant supermarket chain, Tesco, has echoed this call.
The Guardian and Telegraph, are today reporting that British scientists have created ten human embryos which each include DNA from one man and two women. This was done by taking a one day old IVF embryo and removing its pronuclei (the parts containing the chromosomes from the parents). These were then inserted into an egg cell from the second woman, which has had its nucleus removed. The result is a new embryo with its primary DNA coming from a man and a woman, and the body of its cell coming from the second woman. This is an amazing experiment, and comes hot on the heels of other multi-parent experiments, but why has it been performed and what are the ethical implications?
Read More »A child of many parents: a new way to have two mothers
One of the most important ideas in public health is that we can never really save lives: we just extend them. If a doctor ‘saves the life’ of a 60 year old patient who later dies at 90 years of age, then she hasn’t actually stopped the patient dying, but has extended the patient’s life by 30 years.
With this in mind, consider the recent research by a team from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They investigated the effects of a vast array of different chemicals on a test organism, the tiny nematode worm C. elegans. While many were found to be harmful, one chemical was greatly beneficial, significantly extending the worm’s short life span.
The earlier we can diagnose serious illnesses, the more we can do to cure them. Many advances have been made in diagnosis over the last century, but a serious bottleneck has remained. The patients need to come to a medical practitioner in order to be diagnosed and this means that they need to wait for… Read More »Home medical diagnosis
