Health & Human Rights an International Journal is now available.

Articles include:
“Challenging orthodoxies: The road ahead for health and human rights” by Paul Farmer
“Excluding the poor from accessing biomedical literature: A rights violation that impedes global health” by Gavin Yamey
“Will we take suffering seriously? Reflections on what applying a human rights framework to health means and why we should care” by Alicia Ely Yamin
“What is a human-rights based approach to health and does it matter?” by Leslie London
“Heath systems and the right to the highest attainable standard of health” by Paul Hunt, Gunilla Backman
“A human rights approach to quality of life and health: Applications to public health programming” by Armando De Negri Filho
“From market competition to solidarity? Assessing the prospects of US health care reform plans from a human rights perspective” by Anja Rudiger

One of benefits of human cloning, we were told, would be the ability to clone someone with a disease like ALS (Lou Gehrig’s in America, motor neurone disease in the UK and elsewhere), to obtain stem cells from the embryo for disease study. Indeed, before he decided to abandon cloning in favor of iPSCs, that is precisely what Ian Wilmut had a license to do in the UK.

Well, so far no human cloned embryonic stem cells have been derived despite years of trying. But in less than one year since the first iPSC human line was created, that precise achievement has already been accomplished. From the Harvard-Columbia press release:

Harvard and Columbia scientists have for the first time used a new technique to transform an ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease) patient’s skin cells into motor neurons, a process that may be used in the future to create tailor-made cells to treat the debilitating disease. The research–led by Kevin Eggan, Ph.D. of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute–will be published July 31 in the online version of the journal Science.

This is the first time that skin cells from a chronically-ill patient have been reprogrammed into a stem cell-like state, and then coaxed into the specific cell types that would be needed to understand and treat the disease.

Though cell replacement therapies are probably still years away, the new cells will solve a problem that has hindered ALS research for years: the inability to study a patient’s motor neurons in the laboratory.

An amazing achievement. Thanks, in my opinion, partly to President Bush’s courage, biotechnology is now moving in the right direction. Think of it: no women’s health endangered from egg extraction, no instrumentalization of human life, few brave new world worries. A true win-win.

Babies conceived through IVF are much more likely to die at birth than those conceived naturally, the results of a new study show. (Telegraph)

Meet Joe’s genes. Residing within each of his body’s 100 trillion cells are 23 pairs of chromosomes containing as many as 25,000 genes made up of more than 3 billion base pairs of nucleotides, the structural units of DNA and RNA. If Joe could transfer that data to a CD, the file would occupy as much space as his copy of Led Zeppelin IV. (Health IT)

The South Korean government on Friday barred disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk from resuming his research into cloned human embryonic stem cells. (Reuters)

Scientists have turned skin cells from patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease into motor neurons that are genetically identical to the patients’ own neurons. (HealthDay)