Next steps in human cloning: cloned blastocysts

Darkfrog submitted, created time 11 months 3 weeks (www.nature.com)

A team in California claims to have performed in truth what disgraced Seoul U. researcher Woo Suk Hwang had faked: Stegeman company of La Jolla CA claims the creation of a cloned blastocyst from which a tailored cell line can be made. They started with an adult patient's own cells, in this case, a man's fibroblasts.

The article doesn't explicitly say, but since this is a blastocyst, I am assuming that it went through a totipotent state. The pro-life crowd would consider this morally objectionable

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"Virgin" birth stem cells may offer tissue bank

Do frozen human ova remain viable? Different voices disagree.

Hecate submitted, created time 1 year 2 months (www.nature.com)

Scientists are debating whether the practice of freezing human ova should be considered experimental or whether it should be deemed standard. (This distinction, pedantic though it may seem, has some consequences for health insurance.) The debate covers not only the best method for freezing eggs (slow-freeze vs. fast, in layman's terms) but the circumstances under which it is appropriate to do so at all.

Many women choose to freeze their eggs because of illness. For example, some forms of radiation and chemotherapy can cause infertility

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Studies to find better ways to preserve human eggs, ovarian tissue under way

bioman submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (www.eurekalert.org)

The goal is to make human eggs, ovarian tissue, blood vessels, even whole organs available when needed.

To get there, researchers are directly comparing slow-freezing techniques, used successfully for decades to preserve sperm and embryos, to a more rapid method of cryopreservation that transforms tissues into durable glass-like structures.

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Hopes Dashed: Women Don't Generate New Eggs

claudia submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (www.livescience.com)

Since the 1950s, women were told all the eggs they'd ever carry were created before they were born. A couple years back, however, research on mice suggested eggs might be generated later in life. That gave a glimmer of hope to women who suffered infertility problems.

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