University researchers have found a way to use nanotechnology to have chemotherapy drugs target only cancer cells, keeping healthy tissue safe from the treatment’s toxic effects. Cancer researchers have been trying to figure out a way to better deliver drugs, like chemotherapy, to cancer cells without blasting surrounding cells as well. Last week, scientists at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., devised a way to use single-walled carbon nanotubes as targeted medicinal delivery vehicles. (Computerworld)

Review of Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique:
In a hair-raising final chapter, Gazzaniga turns to the question of whether technology may eventually make us something other than human, exploring such potential enhancements as brain implants and germ-line gene therapy, which alters the DNA in sperm, egg or embryo (thus passing the changes on to future generations). It’s one thing to eliminate genes that cause cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy, which tests already allow us to detect in developing embryos. But what happens, Gazzaniga asks, when we identify genes that indicate a high probability of developing diabetes or heart disease in middle age? Will we toss the embryo, “start all over again and try for a better one?” Or change the offending genes based on probabilistic outcomes? (New York Times)

In February 1926, Russian biologist Ilia Ivanov set out for Guinea in French West Africa, where he planned to perform one of the world’s most sensational experiments. Ivanov was an expert in artificial insemination and had used his ground-breaking methods to create an assortment of hybrid animals. Now he was going to try something even more radical - crossing an ape and a human. His trip to Africa was expensive and its purpose highly questionable, yet the Bolshevik government not only sanctioned it but also financed it at a time when few Russians were allowed to leave the country. Why would so eminent a scientist risk his reputation? And why did the Bolsheviks back him? (New Scientist)

Japanese scientists said Friday they had derived stem cells from wisdom teeth, opening another way to study deadly diseases without the ethical controversy of using embryos. (PhysOrg)

For the past 20 years, cord blood stem cell transplants have been used to treat leukemia and other blood diseases. (WRAL)

The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post all reported Sen. John McCain’s assertion at a forum hosted by Pastor Rick Warren that he believes “a baby [is] entitled to human rights” “[a]t the moment of conception.” But none of the articles raised the question of how McCain reconciles this statement with his support for federal funding of embryonic stem cell research and certain exceptions to a ban on abortion. (Media Matters)

A federal judge in Newark yesterday ordered PTC Therapeutics Inc. in South Plainfield to give an experimental drug to a 16-year-old boy with a rare, terminal form of muscular dystrophy, even though the biotech says he does not qualify for the treatment. (NJBiz)

Contrary to an Aug. 11 Times editorial, AB 2747 is a legally confused solution to non-existent problems that opens the way to doctor-assisted suicide. This legislation is not cut and dry; rather, it raises substantive policy questions relating to bioethics and health law. (Los Angeles Times)

He is well-known in the international scientific world for his breakthrough discovery in stem cell technology. He has found and cultured stem cells from the amniotic membrane of newborn babies’ umbilical cords. (Thanh Nien Daily)

The Bush administration yesterday announced plans to implement a controversial regulation designed to protect doctors, nurses and other health-care workers who object to abortion from being forced to deliver services that violate their personal beliefs. (Washington Post)

Transplanting faces may seem like science fiction, but doctors say the experimental surgeries could one day become routine. Two of the world’s three teams that have done partial face transplants reported Friday that their techniques were surprisingly effective, though complications exist and more work is still needed. (Associated Press)