BioEdge

After 23 years, BioEdge ceased published in May 2024. Not that there isn’t lots to report on and talk about, but our resources proved insufficient to move forward in an increasingly competitive environment. We began publication in 2001, smack in the middle of the controversy over embryonic stem cells. The mainstream media was full of news about promising new developments — based mostly on press releases from scientists working with human embryos.

There is growing acknowledgement of the fact that the backgrounds, ideas, and politics of American academics are out of step with the backgrounds, ideas and...

“Enhancement” normally connotes adding powers beyond normal human functioning. However, there are dark kinds of enhancement which remove them. A Norwegian national living in England has just been found guilty of several counts of grievous bodily harm for running a castration website catering for men who want to be “nullos” – males without genitals. Marius Gustavson, 46, and others carried out many mutilations through his “eunuch-maker” site, which had about 23,000 subscribers around the world.

There is growing acknowledgement of the fact that the backgrounds, ideas, and politics of American academics are out of step with the backgrounds, ideas and politics of the American public. “Tenured and tenure-track college professors are drawn from a narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society,” writes Musa al-Gharbi, a journalism professor at Stony Brook University.

There is growing acknowledgement of the fact that the backgrounds, ideas, and politics of American academics are out of step with the backgrounds, ideas and...

Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children by offering free sperm on the internet. A documentary by Noovo Info, a Quebec news outlet said that they posted ads on Facebook – “an online ‘parallel universe’ of free sperm donation not regulated by Health Canada”. Noovo Info initially investigated reports that a couple of men from the same family were giving sperm away.

Bioethicist Carl Elliott relishes stirring up fellow bioethicists and the medical profession. In his latest book, The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No, he examines the role of whistleblowers in uncovering medical scandals. He knows from experience. He fought for years to get his own institution, the University of Minnesota, to acknowledge its role in the suicide of a man in an industry-funded clinical trial of antipsychotic drugs.

When COVID began to spread rapidly in 2020, sending the UK and other countries into lockdowns, many people asked what they could do to help....

The United States is one of the few countries where IVF sex selection is legal – and it is a US$500 million market, according to a provocative feature in Slate. One of the leading practitioners, Dr Jeffrey Steinberg, of the Fertility Institutes in Los Angeles, says that its potential is unlimited. “The market is the size of the human race.” Sex selection used to be controversial.

How would it feel to discover that your father is a sperm donor, that you have at least 200 half-siblings, and that all of them...