Category: Genetics
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Ethical issues dog genetic testing and biobanks
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IT COULD change the way disease is diagnosed and treated: millions of human tissue samples, their information stored in vast databases, allowing health researchers to trawl for patterns. The patterns could point to disease risk among population groups, and could one day lead to the possibility of personalised medicine. This…
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Stem cell research outstrips legislation
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It starts in a dish: a collection of cells that can be made to grow into corneas, hearts or livers, or used to treat currently incurable diseases. This is the future that stem cell therapies could offer us, but the path to that future is strewn with ethical and legal…
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The Murky Morality of Biobanking
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Biobanks are in short supply in South Africa, a place whose inhabitants have some of the greatest genetic diversity in the world. These repositories of human tissue, used for health research, could save lives as scientists find links between diseases and population groups – and, possibly, cures to currently untreatable…