NEW YORK — When pregnant women take ACE inhibitor medication during their first trimester, the risk of the infants having major malformations is more than doubled, according to a study in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine. Angiotensin-converting-enzyme (or ACE) inhibitors are widely used to treat high blood pressure, and are often prescribed for people with diabetes. Many formulations are available, sold under numerous brand names. ‘Exposure to ACE inhibitors during the first trimester cannot be considered safe and should be avoided,’ Dr. William O. Cooper, from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, and colleagues caution. It has already been recognized that taking ACE inhibitors during the second and third trimesters can lead to birth defects, the investigators note. It was believed that use of the drugs during the first three months of pregnancy was safe, and this idea was reinforced by studies in animals, the authors note. However, Cooper’s group was not convinced. To look into the issue, they used data from Tennessee Medicaid records to identify 29,507 infants born between 1985 and 2000, excluding infants born to mothers with diabetes. In the first trimester, 209 infants were exposed to ACE inhibitors and […]
Recruiting women to donate eggs for stem cell research brings scientists into new ethical territory where the standards are still being worked out, ethicists say. Women who donate eggs have to take drugs and undergo minor surgery. This puts them at risk for side effects, yet there is no immediate benefit to them or anyone else — an uneasy and probably unprecedented combination. People volunteer to be a part of other types of research that promise them no benefit, but the risks are negligible. On the other hand, there are many patients who volunteer for research that poses real risks, such as studies of experimental drugs, but this is offset by the immediate possibility that they might be helped. And living kidney and liver donors face risks, but with the immediate benefit of helping the person who needs the organ transplant. Today, fertility clinics routinely recruit women to donate eggs, but the eggs are used to help other women become pregnant, and there is a reasonable chance of success. In contrast, the chances of success for cloning human embryonic stem cells are unknown, creating a quandary for ethicists and society: How much risk should a woman […]
WASHINGTON — It should be glorious to be Bill Gray, professor emeritus. He’s the guy who predicts the number of hurricanes that will form during the coming tropical-storm season. He works in the atmospheric-science department of Colorado State University. He’s mentored dozens of scientists. But he’s also outraged. Much of his government funding has dried up. He has had to put his own money, more than $100,000, into keeping his research going. If none of his colleagues comes to his funeral, he says, that’ll be evidence that he had the courage to say what they were afraid to admit. Which is this: Global warming is a hoax. He has testified about this to the U.S. Senate. He has written magazine articles, given speeches, done everything he could to get the message out. ‘I’ve been in meteorology over 50 years. I’ve worked damn hard, and I’ve been around. My feeling is some of us older guys who’ve been around have not been asked about this. It’s sort of a baby-boomer, yuppie thing.’ Gray believes in observations. Direct measurements. Numerical models can’t be trusted. Equation pushers with fancy computers aren’t the equals of scientists who fly […]
BASARA — The women of Basra have disappeared. Three years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, women’s secular freedoms – once the envy of women across the Middle East – have been snatched away because militant Islam is rising across the country. Across Iraq, a bloody and relentless oppression of women has taken hold. Many women had their heads shaved for refusing to wear a scarf or have been stoned in the street for wearing make-up. Others have been kidnapped and murdered for crimes that are being labelled simply as ‘inappropriate behaviour’. The insurrection against the fragile and barely functioning state has left the country prey to extremists whose notion of freedom does not extend to women. In the British-occupied south, where Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army retains a stranglehold, women insist the situation is at its worst. Here they are forced to live behind closed doors only to emerge, concealed behind scarves, hidden behind husbands and fathers. Even wearing a pair of trousers is considered an act of defiance, punishable by death. One Basra woman, known only as Dr Kefaya, was working in the women and children’s hospital unit at the city university when she started receiving […]
Stepping into a research area marked by controversy and fraud, Harvard University scientists said Tuesday they are trying to clone human embryos to create stem cells they hope can be used one day to help conquer a host of diseases. ‘We are convinced that work with embryonic stem cells holds enormous promise,’ said Harvard provost Dr. Steven Hyman. The privately funded work is aimed at devising treatments for such ailments as diabetes, Lou Gehrig’s disease, sickle-cell anemia and leukemia. Harvard is only the second American university to announce its venture into the challenging, politically charged research field. The University of California, San Francisco, began efforts at embryo cloning a few years ago, only to lose a top scientist to England. It has since resumed its work but is not as far along as experiments already under way by the Harvard group. A company, Advanced Cell Technology Inc. of Alameda, Calif., is trying to restart its embryo cloning efforts. And British scientists said last year that they had cloned a human embryo, though without extracting stem cells. Scientists have long held out the hope of ‘therapeutic cloning’ against diseases like diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and spinal cord […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
