'Manufactured' Babies of Same-Sex Parents May Soon Be Reality
By Beth Greenfield,
Yahoo Parenting
| 02. 26. 2015
[Quotes CGS's Marcy Darnovsky]
Untitled Document
In a world where egg harvesting, gestational surrogacy, genetic selection, and now mitochondrial replacement — aka “three-parent babies,” given final approval in Britain on Tuesday — are realities, it’s not quite as easy as it used to be to find shock value in newfangled IVF methods. But news of yet another fertility breakthrough has been getting attention this week, with some saying it will allow same-sex couples to “manufacture” biological babies.
“It has already caused interest from gay groups because of the possibility of making egg and sperm cells from parents of the same sex,” Jacob Hanna, an Israeli scientist collaborating on the project with Cambridge University professor Azim Surani, told the U.K.’s Sunday Times. He said it could become possible to use the technique to create a baby in just two years.
The latest research has found it possible to create primordial germ cells — cells that will go on to become egg and sperm — by using human embryonic stem cells, explains a Cambridge University press release. “Although this has already been done using...
Related Articles
By Priyanka Runwal, Chemical and Engineering News | 08.05.2024
Saritee Sanodiya, 26, has spent countless days wondering if she’ll ever live a “normal” life. Growing up, Sanodiya often missed school, frequenting the hospital for sudden, life-threatening drops in her hemoglobin levels and excruciating pain in her joints. High fever...
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Sarah Kliff and Azeen Ghorayshi, The New York Times | 07.15.2024