[JURIST] The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled Tuesday that Swiss law does not provide sufficient guidelines on the extent of the right to die, in violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights . Article 8 protects an in…
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Author Archive: Simone Penasa
[Bio News] Last week, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics presented its report on ethical aspects of information sharing in donor conception. Although the moral acceptability of third-party reproduction is still debated, this report importantly starts…
[BBC News] The case relates to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2009, and centres on whether companies should be able to patent genes.
US authorities have been awarding patents on genes to universities and medical companies for …
03/30/2013
Stem-cell ruling riles researchers
[Nature: By Alison Abbott] Clinics that offer unproven stem-cell treatments often end up playing cat and mouse with health regulators, no matter which country they operate in. In Italy, however, one such treatment now has official sanction. The countr…
[BBC News] Health data over 20 years was compared with figures from 18 other countries in the research published in the Lancet.
Although average life expectancy has risen by four years since 1990, it says the UK needs to increase its strategies for ta…
[ScienceInsider] (by Jocelyn Kaiser) A review of the 200 or so human embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines approved by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for federal funding has found a possible ethical problem: Some of the cell lines may have involved…
02/17/2013
No anonymity for sperm donors, court rules
[Deutsche Welle] The decision of a regional appeals court in Hamm that the children of sperm donors have the right to know who their fathers are could have a wider impact – some 100,000 children in Germany were born to sperm donors.
For people who …
01/29/2013
Genetic privacy: How private is private?
[Nature] How private is private? A study published on 17 January reveals vulnerabilities in the security of public databases that contain genetic data, the latest in a series of similar revelations. So far, research funders that host the databases have…
[Nature] The US Supreme Court today ended an effort to shut down government support of human embryonic-stem-cell research, by refusing to hear a case that challenged the legality of funding for the work by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The …