First Babies Born In IVF Genetic Screening

Two women have given birth to healthy babies from eggs screened for genetic defects before being implanted in the womb, in a study of a new technique that could improve the success rate of in-vitro fertilization.

Twin girls born in Germany in June and a boy born in Italy in September are the first deliveries in a pilot study of a technique called comparative genomic hybridisation (CGH) by microarray, European scientists said on Friday.

The technique is a new way of screening eggs and embryos for genetic defects to increase the odds a woman achieves a healthy pregnancy from in-vitro fertilization (IVF), when eggs are fertilized with sperm in a lab dish and implanted into her womb.

The births were part of a "proof of principle" analysis on whether this method of screening of oocytes, or egg cells, and embryos before transfer in IVF can help to increase birth rates.

"We have learnt from more than 30 years of IVF that many of the embryos we transfer have chromosome abnormalities," Luca Gianaroli, chairman of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) and one of the scientists who worked on the study, said in a statement.

Gianaroli said two out of every three embryos implanted by doctors into a woman's womb during IVF fail to develop into a pregnancy, often because of these abnormalities.

"The whole world of IVF has been trying to find an effective way of screening for these abnormalities for more than a decade," Gianaroli said. "Now we have a new technology...and our hopes are that this will finally provide a reliable means of assessing the chromosomal status of the embryos we transfer."

The study was conducted in Bologna, Italy, and Bonn, Germany and designed and organized by the ESHRE to find out the clinical value of CGH.

Cristina Magli, an embryologist who worked on the study at the SISMER Center in Bologna said in a statement that all three babies and their mothers were "doing very well in terms of weight and overall developmental performance."

The scientists said the next step is for the pilot study to be upgraded to a large-scale international clinical trial which is expected to start in 2011.

If it proves successful in larger trials, experts say the new CGH screening is most likely to be used to help women over the age of 37 who undergo IVF, or those with a history of miscarriage or a record of unsuccessful IVF treatments.

All of these conditions are associated with a higher than average rate of embryonic chromosomal abnormality.

The technique is also likely to be important in countries such as Germany where interfering with or freezing of embryos is banned but analysis of oocyte or egg cells is allowed.

One in six couples worldwide experience some form of infertility problem at least once during their reproductive lifespan. EHRE says the current prevalence of infertility that lasts for at least 12 months is estimated to be an average of 9 percent worldwide for women aged 20-44.

US and Japanese scientists win Nobel prize for chemical

A US and two Japanese scientists won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday for inventing new ways to bind carbon atoms with uses that range from fighting cancer to producing thin computer screens.

Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki shared the prize for the development of "palladium-catalysed cross-coupling", the Nobel Committee for Chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

"Palladium-catalysed cross-coupling is used in research worldwide, as well as in the commercial production of, for example, pharmaceuticals and molecules used in the electronics industry," the committee said.

Such chemicals include one found in small quantities in a sea sponge, which scientists aim to use to fight cancer cells. Thanks to the scientists' chemical tool, researchers can now artificially produce this substance, called discodermolide.


Heck, now with the University of Delaware in the United States, developed his work on palladium as a catalyst in the 1960s and early 1970s, while the other two came through with their variants of the same process in the late 1970s.

Negishi, who is at Purdue University in the United States, said he was sound asleep when the academy telephoned him at 5 a.m. local time, but was extremely happy to be woken.

"This means a lot. I would be telling a lie if I wasn't thinking about this. I told someone that I began thinking -- dreaming -- about this prize half a century ago."

Suzuki, of Hokkaido University in northern Japan, was also pleased and said science was important for his country.

"I don't know how much longer I'll live, but I want to continue to work to help young people," he told a news conference in Hokkaido.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan welcomed the news his two countrymen had won the prize. "I hope this encourages more young people and children to say 'I'll work hard to win a Nobel prize'," he told reporters in Tokyo.

Joseph Francisco, president of the American Chemical Society and himself a professor at Purdue, said the three worked in parallel for years. "They have just played off of each other," Francisco said in a telephone interview.

NEW CATALYSTS

"Professors Negishi and Suzuki and Professor Heck have developed new catalysts for doing specific types of reactions that connect new atoms and connect new functional groups to allow a broader array of new compounds to be made."

"It revolutionises the kinds of techniques that chemists have available to make new medicines and new plastics and new materials," he added.
The prize does not come as a surprise, Francisco said, because the work is so fundamental and significant.
The main problem the scientists overcame was how to make atoms of carbon, a very stable substance, more active and thus likely to link together to make bigger, more useful compounds.

Using palladium in the reaction meant fewer byproducts were made, giving a more precise and efficient tool for scientists.

BNP rejects ' free' transit

BNP has called upon the government to decide on transit for India after assessing its economic benefits. The opposition party has no qualms if it is beneficial to the country.

The opposition on Thursday also claimed that the government is vague on the matter of transit and trans-shipment. It called for a politically unanimous decision on the issue.

BNP leader M K Anwar, who is known for his political rhetoric against transit, clarified the opposition's stand on the matter at a press conference at the party's Gulshan office.

The clarification came two days after finance minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith gave a statement in support of transit, but only if Bangladesh charged fees for the facility. "Government's decision to allow free transit to Indian goods is unacceptable. It makes Bangladesh look like an Indian state, like West Bengal or Assam. This is yet another step towards selling out our sovereignty."

The finance minister on Tuesday said that Bangladesh could not charge VAT on transit. "Transhipment may have such duties. However, we may charge a fee for transit since we are allowing use of our territory." Citing examples from international laws and policies, ex-minister Anwar said, "European and ASEAN nations charge duties and service charges for transit of neighbouring countries' goods."

Anwar asked the government to conduct a research to judge costs and benefits of transit. "If the research shows that transit will be of use to the country, BNP will have no objections." When asked whether BNP had moved away from its earlier stand of opposing transit, Anwar replied in the negative.

"BNP has always said that it does not endorse anything that is against the interest of the country. Benefits of transit-transhipment and port usage to India have to be analysed. It is unacceptable that the government is taking steps without prior assessment."

Anwar accused the government for not paying any attention to obtaining the Tk 240 billion required to develop roads and infrastructure for the transit.

"The prime minister has been pressurised into the agreement while visiting India. Chittagong port usage, changing the route of the Asian Highway, all these are being done to protect Indian interests.

Mount Merapi erupts again over Indonesia

Pic-1:Massive molten lava and searing ash clouds shoot from the crater of Mount Merapi.
**Thousands more people were evacuated from villages around Indonesia's Mount Merapi as The volcano erupted again, shooting ash and heat clouds high into the sky. The 2,914-meter-tall Merapi is a sacred landmark in Javanese culture whose name translates as "Mountain of Fire." Forty-four people have died.
Pic-2::Villagers ride on a truck as they leave their homes on a street covered by volcanic ash
Pic-3::A view of Mount Merapi from a passing airplane.

India: Land of many cell phones, fewer toilets

The Mumbai slum of Rafiq Nagar has no clean water for its shacks made of ripped tarp and bamboo. No garbage pickup along the rocky, pocked earth that serves as a road. No power except from haphazard cables strung overhead illegally.

And not a single toilet or latrine for its 10,000 people.Yet nearly every destitute family in the slum has a cell phone. Some have three.

When U.S. President Barack Obama visits India Nov. 6, he will find a country of startlingly uneven development and perplexing disparities, where more people have cell phones than access to a toilet, according to the United Nations.

Businessman Mukesh Ambani, the world's fourth-richest person, is just finishing off a new $1 billion skyscraper-house in Mumbai with 27 floors and three helipads, touted as the most expensive home on earth. Yet farmers still live in shacks of mud and cow dung.

The cell phone frenzy bridges all worlds. Cell phones are sold amid the Calvin Klein and Clinique stores under the soaring atriums of India's new malls, and in the crowded markets of its working-class neighborhoods. Bare shops in the slums sell pre-paid cards for as little as 20 cents next to packets of chewing tobacco, while street hawkers peddle car chargers at traffic lights.

The spartan Beecham's in New Delhi's Connaught Place, one of the country's seemingly ubiquitous mobile phone dealers, is overrun with lunchtime customers of all classes looking for everything from a 35,000 rupee ($790) Blackberry Torch to a basic 1,150 rupee ($26) Nokia.

Most of the slumdwellers are ragpickers who sort through heaps of trash for scraps of plastic, glass, metal, even bones, anything they can sell to recyclers for cash. A pungent brew of ripe garbage and sewage blows through the trash-strewn streets, as choking smoke from wood fires rolls out the doorways of windowless huts. Children, half clothed in rags, play hopscotch next to a mysterious gray liquid that has gathered in stagnant puddles weeks after the last rainfall.

Just beside the shacks, men and women defecate in separate areas behind rolling hills of green foliage that have sprung up over the garbage. Children run through those hills, flying kites.

Khatija Sheikh, 20, splurges to use a pay toilet in another neighborhood 10 minutes away, but is never sure what condition it will be in.

"Sometimes it's clean, sometimes it's dirty. It's totally dependent on the owner's mood," says Sheikh, whose two young children use the street. Her home is less than five feet from an elevated outhouse built by a neighbor that drops sewage next to her walls.

Since there are no water pipes or wells here, residents are forced to rely on the water mafia for water for cooking, washing clothes, bathing and drinking. The neighborhood is rife with skin infections, tuberculosis and other ailments.

A large blue barrel outside a home is filled with murky brown water, tiny white worms and an aluminum drinking cup. To fill up two jerry cans costs between 40 ($.90) and 50 ($1.10) rupees a day, about one-third of the average family's earnings here.

"If the government would give us water, we would pay that money to the government," said Suresh Pache, 41, a motorized rickshaw driver.

'Saw 3D' Movie takes top box-office slice with $24.2M

Lionsgate's "Saw 3D," billed as the final installment in the series about Jigsaw's legacy of bloody terror, debuted as the Halloween weekend's No. 1 movie with $24.2 million, according to studio estimate Sunday.

That was $10 million more than the debut of last year's "Saw VI," the first dud in the annual horror franchise."Last year, a lot of people said, 'OK, that's it. Put a fork in it, it's done,'" said David spitez of distribution for Lionsgate. "The following week, we were all disappointed and thought, what can we do to reinvigorate the franchise? So we shot the movie in 3-D and said this is the final chapter."

It paid off, though "Saw 3D" still brought a modest return compared to earlier chapters in the "Saw" series, whose second, third, fourth and fifth movies all topped $30 million over opening weekend.

"Saw 3D" also had a soft debut compared to the previous weekend's No. 1 movie, Paramount's "Paranormal Activity 2," a newer fright franchise that opened with $40.7 million. "Paranormal Activity 2" slipped to No. 2 this weekend, raising its total to $65.7 million.

Police block sex abuse survivors near Vatican

Victims of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests demonstrated near the Vatican on Sunday night, holding up placards demanding that the church punish those responsible for cover ups and do more to protect children.

Some 75 victims and their supporters from the United States and several European countries had wanted to march to the Vatican with candles but were blocked by police because they did not have a permit.

The candlelit protest was the first significant demonstration in the shadow of the Vatican by people who had been raped and molested by priests as children, and organizers said it would be repeated until the Holy See takes decisive action to ensure children are safe.

"Today what began as quiet whispers are whispers no more," organizer Gary Bergeron told the crowd, which included about 55 deaf Italians from a notorious Catholic institute for the deaf in Verona where dozens of students say they were sodomized by priests.

Organizers had tried to stage the march on Vatican soil but were forced to hold it nearby after the Holy See denied permission. It is standard Vatican practice to ban non-Vatican-sponsored events from St. Peter's Square.

Sunday's protest kicked off with the unexpected arrival of the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, who said he had wanted to greet the organizers and had prepared a statement he hoped to read. He beat a hasty retreat to his office after a protester shouted "Shame, shame" in Italian.

Lombardi said later he left when he saw "it wasn't going to be easy" to meet with the organizers.

Bergeron met with Lombardi later inside his Vatican office and told him that abuse survivors had been "waiting a lifetime to be able to stand up and speak out."