Free Republic

Parents of 9-year-old boy with special needs who died weighing 17 pounds and was found locked in his 'feces-covered room' are charged with murder A husband and wife have been charged in the death of their 9-year-old son, whose decomposing body was found in a 'feces-covered room' in their home this past August. Police filed criminal homicide charges earlier today against Kimberly A. Tutko and Jarrod N. Tutko Sr., of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, saying their neglect caused the death of their son Jarrod Jr. Jarrod Jr., who was diagnosed with Fragile X syndrome as an infant, weighed just 17 pounds at...

SPERM should be subject to the same product liability laws as car brakes, according to a US judge who has given a teenager with severe learning disabilities the go-ahead to sue the sperm bank that provided her with a biological father. Brittany Donovan, now 13 years old, was born with fragile X syndrome, a genetic disorder causing mental impairment and carried on the X chromosome. She is now suing the sperm bank, Idant Laboratories of New York, under a product liability law more commonly associated with manufacturing defects, such as faulty car brakes. Donovan does not have to show that...

Symptoms of mental retardation and autism have been reversed for the first time in laboratory mice. US scientists created mice that showed symptoms of Fragile X Syndrome - a leading cause of mental retardation and autism in humans. They then reversed symptoms of the condition by inhibiting the action of an enzyme in the brain. The study, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Fragile X Syndrome is linked to mutation in a gene carried on the X chromosome called FMR1. It can cause symptoms ranging from mild learning disabilities to severe autism....

Finding could set the stage for ways to reverse damage in sufferers of the inherited fragile X syndromeIn a case of life imitating art, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) reported today that they had successfully reversed mental retardation in mice, just as scientists did in the classic 1966 novel Flowers for Algernon. In the book by Daniel Keyes, scientists use experimental surgery—first tested on a mouse named Algernon—to dramatically boost the intelligence of a mentally retarded janitor named Charlie Gordon. Now M.I.T. scientists report in Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences USA that they ameliorated...

When Karen Coveler and her husband began trying to have a child, she told her obstetrician that she wanted to take all the DNA tests she could to determine whether she was at risk of passing on a genetic disease to her child. Based on her Ashkenazi Jewish background, Ms. Coveler was offered 10 tests, all of which were negative, and went on to have a normal pregnancy. It was not until her son, Benjamin, was born that she discovered he was deaf. And it was not until a few weeks later that she learned a simple blood test could...