It’s official: In vitro fertilization is no longer a treatment reserved for making small humans. The assisted reproduction technique that has led to the birth of more than 5 million human babies around the world can now be used to produce puppies.
Month: December 2015
Can Green Tea Cause Infertility
Are you a green tea lover? Read this carefully as the cup packed with anti-oxidants and other health benefits may adversely affect your fertility and development in case of frequent use, warn researchers. In experiments over fruit flies, the team from University of California-Irvine discovered that excessive consumption adversely affected development and reproduction in fruit fly populations.
Global Summit Reveals Divergent Views on Human Gene Editing
When nearly 500 scientists, ethicists, legal experts and advocacy groups from more than 20 countries came together in Washington DC last week to produce guidelines for the use of gene editing in humans, the meeting served as a potent reminder of how far genetic engineering has permeated society.
Penis Transplants Being Planned to Help Wounded Troops
Within a year, maybe in just a few months, a young soldier with a horrific injury from a bomb blast in Afghanistan will have an operation that has never been performed in the United States: a penis transplant.
Infertility in Men Tied to Heart Disease, Chronic Conditions
Men with infertility have a higher risk for a variety of other chronic medical conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, alcohol abuse, and drug abuse, according to a retrospective cohort study published online December 7 in Fertility and Sterility.
5 Signs Your Birth Control Isn’t As Effective As It Could Be
If you’re already using birth control, then you’re (sadly) already ahead of much of the pack in terms of avoiding an unwanted pregnancy. But you should still be on the lookout for signs that your birth control isn’t as effective as it could be. Whether it’s because you’ve chosen a method that isn’t optimal for you in some way, because of lack of knowledge, or because of simple user error, you could still end up pregnant — and many birth control users do.
Reasons Women Don’t Always Tell Their Doctor About Hot Flashes
Feverish flushed skin. Hot one minute and chilled the next. Sweating accompanied by mild nausea. Palpitations or racing heart. This list of symptoms sounds like the flu but if you are a woman over 40, you just may be experiencing hot flashes.
How Far Away Is Human Cloning?
Human cloning is a very complicated issue, but it seems that scientists are currently bound more by ethical than technical issues. How do you get medical consent for a clone when the clone doesn’t even exist yet? What are the rights of clones? Are they the property of the genetic donor? These are some of the highly controversial questions coming in the not-so-distant future.
The Slow crawl to Designer Babies
Thought leaders, scientists and policy makers from both countries are holding a historic summit in Washington this week to debate the question of “when, if ever, we will want to use gene editing to change human inheritance,” as David Baltimore of Caltech, the summit chairman, put it in his opening remarks. This is the latest conversation among experts to try to determine how much technology is too much.
Scientists Seek Moratorium on Edits to Human Genome That Could Be Inherited
An international group of scientists meeting in Washington called on Thursday for what would, in effect, be a moratorium on making inheritable changes to the human genome.