Sir, I was delighted to see the article of Prainsack et al. (2007) on the comparative attitudes of monozygotic (MZ) twins and dizygotic (DZ) twins on the subject of human reproductive cloning (HRC). It is true that cloning is not portrayed well in the media, and science fiction has a long history presenting us with strange new worlds where human clones are soulless carbon-copies of ‘real’ human...

A November 2000 workshop organized by the International Islamic Center for Population Studies and Research, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, considered use of assisted reproduction technologies (ART) in the Islamic world. The workshop reinforced a 1997 recommendation that a Standing Committee for Shari'a Medical Ethics be constituted to monitor and assess developments in ART practice. Among issues t...

Some authors have argued that the human use of reproductive cloning and genetic engineering should be prohibited because these biotechnologies would undermine the autonomy of the resulting child. In this paper, two versions of this view are discussed. According to the first version, the autonomy of cloned and genetically engineered people would be undermined because knowledge of the method by w...

The metalloproteinase-like, disintegrin-like, cysteine-rich (MDC) family is a large group of sequence-related proteins, first characterized in the male reproductive tract, but subsequently also identified in non-reproductive tissues. Their primary translation products are of approximately 90 kDa and each can be divided into distinct domains which show remarkable homology to reprolysins; snake v...

Global challenges raised by biomedical advances require global responses. Some international organizations have made significant efforts over the last few years to establish common standards that can be regarded as the beginning of an international biomedical law. One of the main features of this new legal discipline is the integration of its principles into a human rights framework. This strat...

OBJECTIVES The mechanisms of obesity associated reproductive complications remain poorly understood. Endometrial mesenchymal stem-cells are critical for cyclic renewal and uterine function. Recently, W5C5(+) cells, with high clonogenicity, capable of producing endometrial stroma in vivo, have been described. We sought to investigate the abundance and cloning efficiency of W5C5(+) and W5C5(-) en...

background:   objective: the purpose of this cross-sectional study was assessment of dose-response relationship between blood lead level (bll) and sex hormones levels in lead exposed male workers.   materials and methods: one hundred and thirteen male workers enrolled. all workers had at least 6 months of lead exposure and no history of diseases or conditions affecting reproductive system. bloo...

background: as a drug target and an antigenic agent, hiv-1 protease (hiv-1 pr) is at the center of attention for designing anti-aids inhibitors and diagnostic tests. in previous studies, the production of the recombinant protease has been faced with several difficulties; therefore, the aims of this study were the easy production, purification of the soluble form of protease in e. coli and inves...