Are DIY gene-testing kits a good idea? 
        
            By Sharon Brennan, 
                The Guardian 
             | 06. 13. 2016
        
                    
                                    
                    
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                            
                              
    
  
  
    
  
          
  
      
    
            “‘It’s like being told you’re going to be involved in a   car crash, but you don’t know when it will hit. You know it is going to   happen but you can’t do anything about it,” says Amy Burton. The   24-year-old from Kent was diagnosed with pre-type 1 diabetes in 2014 after she tested positive for auto-immune antibodies associated with the condition in a medical trial.
 
  Burton   had initially signed up as her younger sister has lived with type 1   diabetes for the past six years and she thought the experience would   make an interesting blog post. She wasn’t expecting to find out that,   within the next five to 15 years she, too, would have the condition: “I   did sob when I heard,” she says.
 
  Burton already knew how   devastating type 1 diabetes can be, with complications such as blindness   and amputations, while research also shows it can cut your   life-expectancy by more than a decade. Now, she is constantly aware of   her pre-diabetic status, has started exercising more and – although she   has a healthy BMI – is conscious...
 
       
 
  
 
    
    
  
   
                        
                                                                                
                 
                                                    
                            
                                  
    
  
  
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[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
 
       
 
 
  
      
    
    
                
                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
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                                                           By Julia Black,  MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
                                                        
     
    
    
            Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...