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Graphic: Cathleen Heard Results of two studies from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center challenge accepted medical practice of "sex reassignment"--surgically converting XY males with absent or minuscule penises into anatomical females, then raising them as girls. The investigations, which are the first to go beyond individual case reports, reveal outcomes that are remarkably consistent with rare instances of infants who lost their penises in accidents and who were reassigned as females. Both cli

Photo courtesy of David G. Kingston From left, Kim Wright; a tribal healer (name unknown); and Frits Van Troon, a Suriname ethnobotanist, examine a medicinal plant. In his new book, Medicine Quest,1 ethnobotanist Mark J. Plotkin describes a plant that forest dwellers in Suriname, on the northern coast of South America, call nekoe. They crush its stems and sprinkle them on streams to stun fish. The local Maroons, who are descendants of 17th century slaves of the Dutch, claim that tapirs eat neko

Europe's forest area is expanding by half a million hectares a year, enough to cover Belgium in six years or Switzerland in eight, according to a joint report of the Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN Economic Commission for Europe.Moreover, claims the report, temperate and boreal forests absorb about as much carbon every year as is released by tropical deforestation, thus slowing the speed of climate change.The report covers the forest resources of not only Europe, but also the Commo

The General Medical Council promises reform.

"The illegal wildlife trade is the third biggest form of smuggling from Latin America, after the illegal smuggling of drugs and arms" says a Colombian expert. And now genetic material can be "hidden under your nail".

The views of South African President Thabo Mbeki - who has expressed doubts whether HIV causes AIDS, ascribing the disease to poverty - have stimulated 5000 scientists and doctors from over 80 countries to sign a declaration stating that the virus really does cause the disease. The issue is crucial for two reasons: first because South Africa faces one of the worst AIDS epidemics in the world, and if the country doubts the cause of the disease health interventions will go awry; and second because

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, best known for its very visible work in short-term humanitarian disasters, has made a dramatic shift to the longer view - where disease is the great killer.Releasing its latest annual report this week, the Societies say that the death toll from infectious diseases such as AIDS, malaria, respiratory diseases and diarrhoea is 160 times greater than the number killed in last year's natural disasters, including the massive earthqu

Small signs of hope amidst increasing gloom. That's the world AIDS situation according to UNAIDS.

Small signs of hope amidst increasing gloom. That's the world AIDS situation according to UNAIDS.

Small signs of hope amidst increasing gloom. That's the world AIDS situation according to UNAIDS.

Small signs of hope amidst increasing gloom. That's the world AIDS situation according to UNAIDS.

PPL Therapeutics Ltd of Roslin, Edinburgh, showed today how they succeeded a year ago (the delay was to secure a patent) in targeting a gene to a chosen location in embryonic sheep fibroblasts. Then they transferred the nucleus to stem cells and created whole transformed, gene-targeted sheep (Nature paper 1 and paper 2).We have succeeded in cloning sheep, goats, cows, pigs and mice, and now we have gene targeting in sheep. But it is proving difficult to clone whole animals efficiently, as the sc