[NYTimes] On a clear and mild March day in 1993, the Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry spoke at a rally in southern Florida against abortion. “We’ve found the weak link is the doctor,” he told the crowd. “We’re going to expose them. We’re going to humiliate them.” A few days later, Dr. David Gunn, an [...]

[AP] Scientists announced a bold step Thursday in the enduring quest to create artificial life. They’ve produced a living cell powered by manmade DNA.
While such work can evoke images of Frankenstein-like scientific tinkering, it also is exciting hopes that it could eventually lead to new fuels, better ways to clean polluted water, faster vaccine production [...]

[CNN] Scientists appear to have broken another barrier in stem cell research by creating a better research model to study human illnesses – a pig – actually 34 pigs.  It’s an important advance for research because pigs are much more like humans than other lab animals are.
The scientists did not clone the pigs – instead [...]

Church backs science to provide alternative to embryonic stem cells
[AP] The Vatican is pushing for research of adult stem cells as an alternative to the use of embryonic stem cells, which the Catholic Church opposes because it maintains that the destruction of the embryo amounts to the killing of human life.

On Friday, the Catholic Church [...]

[msnbc] The number of women dying in childbirth worldwide has dropped dramatically, a British medical journal reports, adding that it was pressured to delay its findings until after U.N. meetings this week on public health funding.
A new, separate report by a group headed by the United Nations reached a very different conclusion on maternal mortality, [...]

[AP]  An American infertility clinic is offering free human eggs to one British participant for attending an informational seminar Wednesday in London.
The promotion, which has been described by some as a raffle, has sparked an ethical debate in Britain about whether women should be paid for their eggs — which is illegal in the European [...]

Thousands of preserved human embryos will be disposed of next week following the implementation of a federal law that bars fertility clinics from conducting this medical procedure on religious grounds.
The Dubai Gynaecology and Fertility Centre that stores an estimated 5,000 eggs fertilised through In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) will start the disposal procedure next week, according to [...]

[Reason.com] In November, President Barack Obama issued an executive order establishing a new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. He appointed political scientist and University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann as the chair of the new Bioethics Commission. Such commissions are charged with working through tough questions about intellectual property rights, the protection [...]

[RFERL]  In late December, Snezhana Mitina received a tearful phone call from her friend Svetlana. Sobbing, Svetlana explained she had just read a newspaper article calling for babies with mental disabilities to be killed at birth.
The author, Aleksandr Nikonov, used the word “debil” — a deeply offensive term in Russian — to characterize such children. He [...]

[liveScience] Like babies that can be lulled to sleep with swaying, embryos also prefer to be rocked.
By gently rocking embryos while they grew during in vitro fertilization, scientists increased pregnancy rates in mice by more than 20 percent. The same rock-a-bye procedure could lead to more success for in vitro fertilization in humans, the researchers [...]