It’s becoming more common to freeze human eggs. The implications are interesting. A woman can freeze eggs when she is young for later use, obviously. What if a young woman learns that she is not able to have children? Could she choose to be implanted with eggs her sister has frozen? Sure, that seems okay. What about eggs her mother chose to freeze decades earlier? The baby could be someone’s daughter and granddaughter at the same time. But still just a baby. I imagine these things will all happen within families, if they haven’t already. What about buying and selling eggs though? What about a couple paying a stranger to have their genetic child because they are just too busy or don’t want to be bothered with a pregnancy. That’s slightly more troubling, but I’m sure that too will happen if it hasn’t already.
Tag Archives: biotechnology
super mosquitoes
According to the BBC, now mosquitoes can purposely be infected with a natural virus that out-competes Dengue fever:
The bacteria Wolbachia is found in 60% of insects. It acts like a vaccine for the mosquito which carries Dengue, Aedes Aegypti, stopping the Dengue virus multiplying in its body.
Wolbachia also has an effect on reproduction. If a contaminated male fertilises the eggs of a female without the bacteria, these eggs do not turn into larvae.
If the male and female are contaminated or if only a female has the bacteria, all future generations of mosquito will carry Wolbachia.
As a result, Aedes mosquitoes with Wolbachia become predominant without researchers having to constantly release more contaminated insects.
In Australia this happened within 10 weeks on average.
A statistic that caught my eye:
Brazil leads the world in the number of Dengue cases, with 3.2 million cases and 800 deaths reported in the 2009-2014 period.
Doing the math, that adds up to a death rate of 0.025%.
making chemotherapy “a thing of the past”
From the BBC, this caught my eye:
Prime Minister David Cameron has said it “will see the UK lead the world in genetic research within years”.
The first genetic codes of people with cancer or rare diseases, out of a target of 100,000, have been sequenced.
Experts believe it will lead to targeted therapies and could make chemotherapy “a thing of the past”…
The project has now passed the 100 genome mark, with the aim of reaching 1,000 by the end of the year and 10,000 by the end of 2015