Because of rare illness, Louise Moorhouse is on a special diet of pills or foul-tasting shakes. There’s a drug that would allow her to eat like anyone else – she took it for three years during a clinical trial. But the NHS won’t pay for it, reports the BBC’s Deborah Cohen – and the drug company stopped giving it to her once the trial was over.

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The University of Illinois at Chicago’s acclaimed child psychiatrist Mani Pavuluri put vulnerable children at serious risk in one of her clinical trials by testing the powerful drug lithium on children younger than 13 — violating research rules, failing to properly alert parents of the study’s risks and falsifying data to cover up the misconduct.

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France has banned several types of textured breast implants that have been linked to a rare form of cancer.

The ban, which covers macro-textured and polyurethane implants, took effect on Friday. It was announced this week by France’s National Agency for Safety of Medicines and Health Products, or ANSM, in a letter to manufacturers.

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New research suggests that a controversial gene-editing experiment to make children resistant to HIV may also have enhanced their ability to learn and form memories.

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Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, but scattered outbreaks have occurred in recent years. This year there have been five — in New York, Texas, and Washington State — for a total of more than 120 cases.

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In the fall of 2015, Dr. Herbert Dardik, chief of vascular surgery at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center in New Jersey, nodded off in the operating room.

Note that Dr. Dardik, then 80, was not performing the operation. He’d undergone a minor medical procedure himself a few days earlier, so he’d told his patient that another surgeon would handle her carotid endarterectomy, in which plaque is removed from the carotid artery to improve blood flow.

But when she begged Dr. Dardik at least to be present during the operation, he agreed to sit in. “I was really an accessory,” he recalled. “It was so boring, I kind of dozed off” — whereupon an alarmed nurse-anesthetist reported the incident to administrators.

Within days, the hospital’s chief of anesthesiology and chief medical officer were in Dr. Dardik’s office, praising his surgical skill while urging him to reduce his workload.

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The moment has arrived at last. A woman in a hospital gown steels herself, ready to push. A nearby monitor displays her baby’s heart rate in big, neon numbers. A nurse in crisp scrubs coos in her ear, offering words of encouragement, advice. The scene would resemble any other delivery room if it weren’t for the view outside the window: the soft curvature of the blue Earth against the blackness of space, 250 miles below.

Delivering a child in microgravity may sound like science fiction. But for one start-up, it’s the future.

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Chinese scientists have raced ahead in experimenting with gene-editing on humans in the last few years, using a powerful new tool called Crispr-Cas9 to edit the DNA of dozens of cancer patients.

Information gathered by The Wall Street Journal shows one such trial has lost touch with patients whose DNA was altered, alarming some Western scientists who say subjects should be monitored for many years.

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Ever since scientists created the powerful gene-editing technique CRISPR, they have braced for the day when it would be used to produce a genetically altered human being. Now, the moment they feared may have come. What’s likely to happen next?

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