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The potential therapeutic benefits of research on human embryos areenormous and outweigh the ethical and safety concerns, the UKgovernment decided this week.

Sir Robert May, outgoing UK Chief Scientist, spoke to Robert Walgate about treading the fine line between government and the science community, and the changing face of science in the UK and Europe.

genome sequence will help in developing protection against the disease. Robert Walgate discovers that it might - but perhaps not in the most obvious ways.

Tropical Medicine for malaria was 20 times the size of the School's usual receipts.

An elaborate dirty tricks campaign orchestrated by the tobacco industry to sabotage WHO anti-tobacco efforts is revealed in a WHO report released today.

The UK government is worried. It says science underpins the economy, but the big issue is public opinion, reports Robert Walgate.

LONDON, July 24 (Science Analysed) The 2000-strong International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases concluded on 19 July in Atlanta, Georgia. But if you weren't there, don't despair. The organizers are offering online versions of selected presentations, with audio and slides, scheduled to go live from today, as well as a searchable abstracts system.The Atlanta programme included current work on surveillance, epidemiology, research, communication and training, bioterrorism, and the preven

Life sciences took center stage virtually around the world June 26. President Bill Clinton, flanked on the left by Celera Genomics Group president J. Craig Venter and on the right by National Human Genome Research Institute director Francis S. Collins, announced the completion of "the first survey of the entire human genome."

If humans are 99.9 percent genetically identical, as President Bill Clinton is fond of asserting when he extols the Human Genome Project, that 10th-of-a-percent difference has a lot of explaining to do. How does genetic variation determine a person's unique physical traits? Can it predict someone's susceptibility to a disease? Such questions, pertaining to the present or future, are what occupy most human geneticists. A small group, however, studies genetic variation as a clue to the past. Som

As members of relatively small, cohesive populations, Jews have caught the attention of molecular anthropologists, much as Basques and Icelanders have. Thus, Jewish men who reported being descendants of ancient Jewish priests (Cohens) were found to display distinctive patterns of Y chromosome polymorphisms1; the common ancestor of these "Cohen" chromosomes was dated back to the Old Testament era of about 2,600 to 3,200 years.2 A clan of the Lemba, a black group in southern Africa that claims Je

©Wonderfile U.S.A. Corp. The cat could serve as a model for more than 200 human inborn genetic errors. The Canine Genome Project is big news--not as big as the Human Genome Project, but still "visible," reported on in magazines and newspapers. Ongoing research on the house cat's genome is "not so visible," says geneticist Marilyn Menotti-Raymond of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity (LGD) of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Frederick, Md. But the feline research is more advanced and

In mid-April the Department of Energy (DOE) stole thunder from the National Institutes of Health when it announced the draft decoding of DNA on human chromosomes 5, 16, and 19. Containing an estimated 10,000-15,000 genes, the chromosomes constitute 300 million bases, or an estimated 11 percent of the total human genome. Genes on chromosomes 5, 16, and 19 have been linked to certain forms of kidney disease, prostate and colorectal cancer, leukemia, hypertension, diabetes, and atherosclerosis. But