An Embryonic Disaster?
        
            By Isabel Oakeshott and Sarah-Kate Templeton, 
                The Sunday Times
             | 03. 16. 2008
        
            The government’s new fertility bill is under fire on religious, moral and even scientific grounds
                    
                                    
                    
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                            
                              
    
  
  
    
  
          
  
      
    
            
When Liz Shipley was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND) it came as
little surprise. The 36-year-old from Newcastle had lost her mother to the
same condition when she was just three years old. Several other members of
her family, including her sister and uncle, had died or were suffering from
the muscle-wasting disease.
  
Ten years on and unable to walk, write or dress herself, she fears that her
two teenage children will also inherit the disease. Shipley does not expect
a cure in her lifetime but she backs controversial scientific research using
embryos that are part-human, part-animal, which could lead to a treatment
for her children if they are struck down.
  
“When you have an illness for which there is no cure, you have to investigate
every avenue,” said Shipley. “I do not want my children to be told in 20
years’ time that they have MND and there is still no cure. I believe the
answers will lie in stem cells of some kind. Hopefully this research will be
able to tell us why this is happening to...
 
       
 
  
 
    
    
  
   
                        
                                                                                
                 
                                                    
                            
                                  
    
  
  
      Related Articles
    
  
          
  
  
  
  
  
  
      
            
                  
  
      
    
    
                
                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                                           By Abby McCloskey,  The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
                                                        
     
    
    
            We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
 
       
 
 
  
      
    
    
    
    
            Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[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...
 
       
 
 
  
      
    
    
                
                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                                           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...
 
       
 
 
  
      
    
    
                
                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                                           By Lizzy Lawrence,  Stat News | 10.14.2025