Science and politics clashed at the White House last week as President Bush vetoed a bill authorizing federal support for embryonic stem cell research, USA Today reports. The President said destroying human embryos to extract stem cells crosses a “moral line,” according to the newspaper. But Bill supporters, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), said Bush [Sign in to read the full article...]

Despite two scandals within the past year that rocked the human tissue industry, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration task force report released June 12 concludes there are “no significant industrywide problems” in the recovery of human tissues used for transplantation. The report was issued by FDA’s Human Tissue Task Force, an intra-agency group assembled [Sign in to read the full article...]

Surgeons in Romania last week performed the world’s first partial kidney transplant, allowing a three-year-old boy suffering from kidney failure to receive a part of his mother’s kidney.   The operation was performed at the Urology and Kidney Transplant Institute in the northwestern city Cluj-Napoca. One day after the surgery, lead physician Dr. Mihai Lucan [Sign in to read the full article...]

Human therapeutic cloning moved a step closer to reality after researchers from the Oregon National Primate Research Center announced last week they had successfully created embryonic stem cells from monkey embryos, Reuters news agency reports.   The scientists, led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, told a stem cell research conference in Australia that they had successfully created [Sign in to read the full article...]

A judge has ruled that a Portland, Maine, man can have a jury decide whether his late wife’s brain was taken for medical research without proper consent. James Allen’s wife died in a swimming pool accident in 2001. He filed a lawsuit after learning that her brain had been sent from Maine’s state morgue to [Sign in to read the full article...]