[Rasmussen]  Only 33% of U.S. voters believe that taxpayer money should be spent on embryonic stem cell research, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Fifty-seven percent (57%) say funding for such research should be left to the private sector.
While 55% of voters who identify themselves as pro-choice support government funding of stem cell research, [...]

[msnbc] A U.S. district court issued a preliminary injunction Monday stopping federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research in a slap to the Obama administration’s new guidelines on the sensitive issue.
The court ruled in favor of a suit filed in June by researchers who said human embryonic stem cell research involves the destruction of [...]

[jsonline] The cloning of animals may have come from agriculture, but its real promise may be in the lucrative field of medicine rather than as food.
Genetically modified cows and goats can produce proteins in their milk that can be extracted as a drug component. Cloning animals to create living drug factories could lower the costs [...]

Coalition government promises to abolish respected regulator in effort to cut back on quangos.
[Nature] In the ethically fraught field of human-embryo research, Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has long been regarded as a world leader in regulating and advising scientists.
But now the HFEA faces the axe, and researchers and politicians are chorusing their [...]

[Bloomberg] — Potent stem cells derived from reprogramming skin or other adult body tissues may have limits on their usefulness as an alternative to cells from human embryos, researchers said.
The study found that induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPS cells, retain a “memory” of their original adult tissue, making it more difficult to turn them [...]

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 [...]

[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 [...]

[reuters] The U.S. government broadened the definition of a human embryonic stem cell on Friday, helping qualify several corporate and academic experiments for federal funding.
Dr. Lana Skirboll, director of the Office of Science Policy of the National Institutes of Health, called the change technical and said it would be posted in the federal register for [...]

[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 [...]