Free Republic

How would you feel if your DNA were used without your permission to produce cloned human embryos for medical research? Regardless of whether it is right or wrong to experiment on human embryos, creating them would require either giving women high doses of drugs with unknown side effects to produce the large numbers of eggs needed for cloning research, or the placing of your genes inside cows' or pigs' eggs to produce human-animal hybrid embryos.So you might well expect to be asked to give your explicit permission before such a morally fraught procedure is carried out using your tissue, but...

Devices made of heart tissue could screen drug candidates and be used to power implantable robots. In a fourth-floor lab at Harvard University, Adam Feinberg is peering through a low-magnification microscope and using a scalpel to cut out triangles and rectangles from a thin polymer. What's impossible to see with the naked eye is a one-cell-thick layer of heart tissue coating each shape. When Feinberg connects the petri dish holding the triangles and rectangles to a pacemaker, the tissue begins to rhythmically contract, and the shapes come alive--twisting, pinching, and even swimming through a solution. The pieces of "muscular thin...

There's new hope for the five million people in the United States who live with heart failure. Scientists say they have been able to grow a rat heart in a lab. They were also successful at getting it to start beating. About 50,000 people die each year waiting for a heart donor. But that all may change thanks to a rat heart, built by scientists at the University of Minnesota. "Everyone has cells," Dr. Doris Taylor told CBN News. "What's lacking is a way to put that together in a 3-D structure that lets you create an organ," she explained....

Jim Livingston never gave much thought to the bone transplanted in his neck until that Sunday afternoon when his doctor called to tell him about the recall."Do they want it back?" he asked, half-jokingly.Quickly it became clear that this was no laughing matter.Bone allegedly stolen from a corpse had been used in Livingston's neck to relieve the pain of a ruptured disk.With that bit of news, the 44-year-old Weatherford father joined hundreds of others nationwide who are living with the knowledge that they carry bones and tissue taken illegally from cadavers in what has become a bizarre tale of selling...

Russia bans human tissue export in bioweapon alert 16:22 30 May 2007 NewScientist.com news service Russia has banned the shipment of medical specimens abroad, threatening hundreds of patients and complicating drug trials by major companies, the national Kommersant newspaper reported on Wednesday. Kommersant attributed the ban to fears in the secret service that Russian genetic material could be used abroad to make biochemical weapons targeting Russians. The quality daily cited anonymous sources in the medical community. The ban, initiated by the Ministry of Health and carried out by the Federal Customs Service, began on 28 May. Shipment beyond Russia's borders...

Don't worry, the doctor told Brian Lykins' parents, as he prepared to use cartilage from a cadaver to fix their son's knee. A million people a year have operations that use tissue from donated dead bodies. The nation's largest tissue bank had supplied this cartilage. It was disinfected and perfectly safe, he assured them. But it wasn't. Four days after this routine, elective surgery, Lykins — a healthy, 23-year-old student from Minnesota — died of a raging infection. He died because the cartilage came from a corpse that had sat unrefrigerated for 19 hours — a corpse that had been...

Last year at about this time, it was disclosed that scientists had made an amazing discovery of a Tyrannosaurus rex thigh bone that still retained well-preserved soft tissue (which included blood vessels and cells). For evolutionists who argue that dinosaurs died about 65 million years ago, it was a startling discovery. AiG–USA’s Dr. David Menton (who holds a Ph.D. in cell biology from Brown University) wrote at the time that it “certainly taxes one’s imagination to believe that soft tissue and cells could remain so relatively fresh in appearance for the tens of millions of years of supposed evolutionary history.”...

When it comes to the body, they say you can't take it with you when you die. But they didn't say it should be sold from the back of a truck. Or that you should not have the right to give a fully informed consent for whatever it is that medical science wants to do with your remains. Recently it was revealed that a group of criminals was stealing bones from bodies at crematoriums in New York. They were then sold to for-profit tissue banks in New Jersey and Florida. Among the victims was the late host of PBS television's...

Patricia Battisti had thought her back surgery in early 2005 was routine. A letter from her hospital nearly a year later made it clear she was wrong. Battisti was informed that the cadaver bone that was implanted in her back may have been infected with various viruses -- the result of what investigators say was a large-scale scheme in which corpses were cut up and body parts illegally sold.

Ohio Sen. George Voinovich's stand against the nomination of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has taken an emotional toll. As he took his courageous stand in the well of the Senate, the thought of leaving the fate of his children and grandchildren -- and yours -- in the hands of such a mean man nearly overcame him. Sen. George Voinovich CARES. He cares so much it HURTS. Sometimes it hurts so much, he CRIES. As his constituents, we feel duty-bound to repay our senator's loyalty to us -- his care for us -- his LOVE for...

Scientists have cultured small pieces of heart tissue which beat in the same way as the whole organ.The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team hope the work will lead to new ways of repairing heart damage. They grew the tissue from a few rat heart cells which were placed on an artificial scaffold, and then stimulated with an electric current. Researchers told Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: "Think of it as a patch for a broken heart." Myocardium, or heart muscle cells, cannot regenerate after injury, limiting the effectiveness of standard therapies. And heart cells are difficult to culture...

The Aberdeen Police Department and Aberdeen Fire and Rescue were called to the Brown County Courthouse Tuesday for a complaint of a suspicious substance. Aberdeen Fire and Rescue shift commander Roger Bortnem said an employee reported the substance at approximately 3 p.m. The hazardous materials team was released to investigate. The substance turned out to be lint from Kleenex. "It was an innocent mistake," Bortnem said. "Rather safe than sorry." No further details were available.

A New Use for Old Printers: Treating Burn Victims Researchers in the US are using old inkjet printers to produce sheets of human skin to be used on burn victims. They think that this 'skin-printing' method will minimize rejections by patients and reduce post-operative complications. In this article, the Wall Street Journal (paid registration needed) writes that while the technology is still in its early stages, it could be used clinically within two years. This could be a life-saving technology for the 20% of burn patients who have the most extensive burns. Considering that each year, some 45,000 people...

Monkey born after ovarian tissue transplant 12.03.2004 LONDON - A monkey has given birth to a healthy baby created from an egg taken from transplanted ovarian tissue, in a breakthrough scientists say could lead to new fertility treatment for women with cancer. The baby, named Brenda, is the first primate born using an egg taken not from a working ovary but from parts of the ovary implanted elsewhere in the mother's body. This tissue contains cells that can develop into eggs, without needing a full ovary. The egg was then removed, fertilised and the embryo was transplanted into a surrogate...

BOSTON -- As millions of Catholics prepare for the traditional midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, the Boston Archdiocese is making an unusual plea to parishioners. NewsCenter 5's Jorge Quiroga reported that church leaders are asking anyone with cold or flu symptoms to take certain precautions and avoid some rituals. The announcement comes days after two elderly men on Cape Cod died of flu complications. But public health officials warn against overreactions saying the cases are not unusual considering the ages of the victims, 89 and 90. Parishioners attending Christmas Mass are urged not to shake hands as a sign of...