More than 100 fertility doctors in dozens of states may have brokered unauthorized transfers of human eggs, according to the bankruptcy court filing of a local company and its former records supervisor.

Options National Fertility Registry was forced out of business in 2003 after getting caught up in a tangle of lawsuits in Texas, the court filing says.

An Options donor, identified only as "Elizabeth," had contracted to donate her eggs to one infertile couple, and later learned that the doctor gave some of her eggs to a second couple without her knowledge, permission or consent, the bankruptcy documents say.

(from breitbart.com) The first baby to be created from an egg matured in a laboratory, frozen, thawed and then fertilised, has been born in Canada, researchers told a medical conference on Monday.

The baby girl was born to a woman diagnosed with advanced ovarian disease, and three other women in the 20-person trial group are pregnant by the same technique, researchers said.

Doctors already collect and store eggs from women who face cancer treatment that could cause sterility.

The eggs -- harvested after stimulating the ovaries with hormones -- are fertilised in-vitro with their partner's sperm, then frozen. After the cancer therapy, the eggs are then thawed and implanted.

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Oxnard, Calif., June 25, 2007 – With research backgrounds ranging from materials engineering to molecular biophysics, seventeen leading scientists issued a statement today announcing that, much as the discovery of DNA and creation of the transistor revolutionized science, there is a new scientific field on the brink of revolutionizing our approach to problems ranging from eco-safe energy to outbreaks of malaria.

That research area is synthetic biology – the construction or redesign of biological systems components that do not naturally exist, by combining the engineering applications and practices of nanoscience with molecular biology.

There have been some significant shifts in the campaign for legalised euthanasia in the US in recent years. The supporters of euthanasia are employing public relations campaigners and legislative wordplay in an attempt to make their demands seem less negative and more patient- and people-friendly. But whatever they choose to call it, the central problem with the pro-euthanasia campaign – with these calls for the legalisation of ‘assisted dying’ or ‘physician-assisted suicide’ – is that it provides cultural affirmation for suicide in circumstances where death is unnecessary.

(from gaurdian.com) Britain's leading fertility expert condemned the IVF industry yesterday, saying that it had been corrupted by money and that doctors were exploiting women who were desperate to get pregnant.

Speaking at the Guardian Hay festival, Robert Winston also accused the fertility watchdog, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, of failing to protect women and giving consistently poor information to couples.

"One of the major problems facing us in healthcare is that IVF has become a massive commercial industry," he said. "It's very easy to exploit people by the fact that they're desperate and you've got the technology which they want, which may not work."

(from washingtonpost.com) In its preamble, the recently unveiled U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities recognizes"the inherent dignity and worth and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world."

We wonder what Oliver Wendell Holmes would have said about that.

This month marked the 80th anniversary of the disgraceful Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell, which upheld Virginia's involuntary sterilization laws. In his majority opinion, Holmes declared: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles is enough."

The father-to-be, and his father, have severe squints which cause their eyes to look only downwards or sideways.
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(from dailymail.com) A woman who gave her eggs to help two childless friends fears she has been left infertile by her act of kindness.

Donna Stickels, 26, revealed her personal ordeal to warn other women about the potential dangers of egg donation.

Her story began seven years ago when she offered to help a married friend who was desperate to start a family after years of failed fertility treatment.

Donna's generosity resulted in the delighted woman giving birth to twin boys and she later became their godmother.

A second donation of eggs to another friend failed to result in a pregnancy, but the woman later conceived naturally.

Although both childless women realised their dream of becoming mothers, the fertility treatment appears to have had tragic implications for Donna.
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Bonnie Murphy, 32, a trainee electrician from Oldbury in the West Midlands, got pregnant with her first child, Rosie, now four, within weeks of coming off the pill. Her son, Buster, now three, was conceived when Rosie was just six weeks old - the two children will be in the same school year. "I fell pregnant so easily and had two easy deliveries - I just thought how lucky I'd been," says Murphy. "I have friends who have had difficulty. So I'm very grateful."

Just after the birth of her second baby, she kept spotting stories in the papers about egg donation and decided to become a donor herself. "I went online and was shocked when I saw how many couples are looking for eggs. They were offering thousands of pounds to donors. But I didn't want it to be personal or to be that involved." Instead she donated eggs for free at a local private clinic (she could have claimed expenses but didn't).

Even though Cibelli and his colleagues patented the so-called interspecies cloning technique, they soon abandoned the research as a failure and the uproar subsided.

Now the tempest is brewing all over again.

At least three respected teams of British scientists have reignited the moral debate over inserting human genes into animal eggs by proposing similar experiments to Cibelli's.

Thursday night, the California $3 billion stem cell initiative awarded $74.5 million in grants to 26 different scientific teams around the state, an average of $2.9 million per grant. The money, which was given to established scientific teams who were already working in the field, will be allocated over four years.

The grant-awarding committee was halfway through a two-day meeting, and was planning to make additional commitments Friday. Its goal in the meeting was to award $80 million. To do that, it separated all 70 proposals into three groups: those recommended for funding, proposals that could be funded if sufficient money was available, and the not recommended group. Friday, the committee considered which of the proposals in the second group will get grants.

Emotiv Systems, an electronic-game company from San Francisco, wants people to play with the power of the mind. Starting tomorrow, video-game makers will be able to buy Emotiv's electro-encephalograph (EEG) caps and software developer's tool kits so that they can build games that use the electrical signals from a player's brain to control the on-screen action.

Emotiv's system has three different applications. One is designed to sense facial expressions such as winks, grimaces, and smiles and transfer them, in real time, to an avatar. This could be useful in virtual-world games, such as Second Life, in which it takes a fair amount of training to learn how to express emotions and actions through a keyboard. Another application detects two emotional states, such as excitement and calm. Emotiv's chief product officer, Randy Breen, says that these unconscious cues could be used to modify a game's soundtrack or to affect the way that virtual characters interact with a player. The third set of software can detect a handful of conscious intentions that can be used to push, pull, rotate, and lift objects in a virtual world.

(from telegraph.com) British scientists will be allowed to create part-human, part-animal embryos for research into potentially life-saving medical treatments, the Government signalled yesterday.

Caroline Flint, the health minister, is considering removing a ban on such work from a draft bill that will form the basis for new laws on fertility treatment and embryo research.

Two teams of British researchers have applied for permission to create "cybrid" embryos that would be around 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit, cow, pig, sheep or goat to produce embryonic stem cells – the body's building blocks that grow into all other types of cells.

(from telegraph.co.uk) Women who donate their eggs for research are at risk from life-threatening side effects, scientists warn in a new study.

They say that the powerful drugs given to the volunteers to help increase the number of eggs they produce can cause paralysis, limb amputation and even death.

The warning comes days before the results of a review into a controversial decision to allow doctors to harvest eggs from healthy volunteers for research purposes.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) is expected to endorse its policy, which provoked an outcry when it was announced last year. But the safety of egg donation is questioned by Italian experts.

In backing stem cells, state leaders are promising miracle cures for deadly diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and AIDS—and telling voters that those miracles can be had for free. Spitzer promised during his State of the State address in January that the stem-cell investment "will repay itself many times over in increased jobs, economic activity and improved health."