[washingtonpost] Physicians and the federal government cited the case of a San Francisco Bay area man who has fathered 14 children as an example of the risks posed by the informal market for sperm donations, which doctors consider unsafe but some people call a civil liberties issue.
Trent Arsenault, 36, of Fremont offers his sperm for [...]

[msnbc.com] Researchers have created a remarkable portrait of life for those with Down syndrome — and the people who love them.
Through the  lens of a series of surveys conducted by Children’s Hospital Boston, the Down syndrome experience looks far different — and far happier — than the one most of us are used to picturing.
Most [...]

[Forbes]- Monya Baker has an interesting feature in this week’s issue of Nature, looking at the synthetic biology field a year after J. Craig Venter’s team published their breakthrough Science paper on the generation of a bacterial cell, operating completely on synthetic DNA designed in the lab.
Readers may recall that Venter’s paper touched off a [...]

[Vancouver Sun]- Tens of thousands of human embryos hang in cold storage in Canada’s fertility clinics, an unknown number of which are “orphans.”
Increasingly, however, clinics are preparing to match these embryos — which could survive for decades in suspended animation — with infertile couples who long for a child of their own. It’s a form [...]

[NYTimes] The two mothers-to-be felt the same urgency. Told that their babies had potentially crippling spina bifida, both women hoped to receive an ambitious surgery that closes the hole in the spine while babies are in the womb.
Their only access was through a clinical trial testing whether risky prenatal surgery was better than standard surgery [...]

[Yahoo News] PARIS (AFP) – Doctors in France on Monday announced the country’s first birth of a “savior sibling,” selected at the embryonic stage to be a close genetic match to save a brother or sister suffering from a fatal inherited disorder.
The baby was born at the Antoine Beclere Hospital in Clamart, in [...]

[newswise] Growing up poor can suppress a child’s genetic potential to excel cognitively even before the age of 2, according to research from psychologists at The University of Texas at Austin.
Half of the gains that wealthier children show on tests of mental ability between 10 months and 2 years of age can be attributed to [...]

[nytimes] The president’s bioethics commission says there is no need to temporarily halt research or to impose new regulations on the controversial new field known as synthetic biology.
In a report being issued Thursday, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues says that at present the technology — which involves creating novel organisms through [...]

[Huffington Post] Fordam University bioethicist Charles Camosy introduced Open Hearts, Open Minds and Fair Minded Words: A Conference on Life and Choice in the Abortion Debate at Princeton University on Oct. 15, 2010 by saying that it wasn’t the conference any of its organizers wanted or envisioned. Instead, he and his colleagues Peter Singer (Princeton), [...]

[NPR] ROBERT SIEGEL, host:  In 1978, the phrase in-vitro fertilization was something the experts said.�The rest of the world spoke of test-tube babies. Newspaper columnists and editorial writers invoked Aldous Huxley’s image of baby hatcheries in his dystopian novel “Brave New World.”
Jeffrey Kahn directs the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota Medical School. [...]