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Sir Albert William Liley is often called the “Father of Fetology” for all of his research in embryology and the development of the unborn baby. Here, he talks about fetal development: The prerequisites for motion are the muscles and nerves. In the sixth to seventh week, nerves and muscles work together for the first time. If the area of the lips, the first to become sensitive to touch, is gently stroked, the child responds by bending the upper body to one side and making a quick backward motion with his arms.… By the beginning of the ninth week, the baby...

Embryology Gene Control Confounds Evolution by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * As they say in the real estate business, location is everything. It looks like the same working principle applies to genes and their control sequences in the genome during embryo development. And not just the geneÂ’s simple location in a linear sense, but its three-dimensional spatial location. During the growth of an embryo, genes that direct the developmental processes are precisely switched on and off. This highly complex process contextually confers specific properties to different cells that eventually become the various organs and tissues of the developing embryo. The precise...

Microglia eat neural stem cells in developing rat and monkey brains Zombies aren’t the only things that feast on brains. Immune cells called microglia gorge on neural stem cells in developing rat and monkey brains, researchers report in the Mar. 6 Journal of Neuroscience. Chewing up neuron-spawning stem cells could help control brain size by pruning away excess growth. Scientists have previously linked abnormal human brain size to autism and schizophrenia. “It shows microglia are very important in the developing brain,” says neuroscientist Joseph Mathew Antony of the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the research. Scientists have...

These are differentiating mouse embryonic stem cells (green = mesoderm progenitor cells, red = endoderm progenitor cells). The microRNAs identified in this study block endoderm formation, while enhancing mesoderm formation. An embryo is an amazing thing. From just one initial cell, an entire living, breathing body emerges, full of working cells and organs. It comes as no surprise that embryonic development is a very carefully orchestrated process—everything has to fall into the right place at the right time. Developmental and cell biologists study this very thing, unraveling the molecular cues that determine how we become human. "One of the first,...

Macrophages play a key role in the immune response, protecting organisms against infection and regulating the development of inflammation in tissue. Macrophages differ depending on where they are located and which tasks they perform. A scientist at TUM has been investigating whether these different types of cells have the same origin – and has come up with some surprising results. His findings reveal that there are two distinct macrophage cell lines that continue into adult life and that these two lineages have different origins. The research was recently published in Science magazine. The organs of vertebrates, including of course humans...

The one question that most perplexed the Norwegian TV crew that was interviewing me in my living room was "Why, after so long a time, is abortion still such a desperate controversy here in the United States?" Their experience in Europe gave them few clues. After all, abortion had come to most Western European countries, been rapidly accepted and was now off the political agenda altogether. So they were sincerely trying to figure out why four decades had elapsed since abortion had begun to be legalized in the U.S. and yet abortion was still, as Jan described, "issue number one...

Democrats have spent years congratulating themselves on being smarter than conservatives. You can expect the media therefore to ignore appallingly stupid gaffes on the part of Ivy-educated leaders. Hillary's "smart power" diplomacy  is looking oxymoronic in the wake of her stupid question about who painted the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on a visit to Mexico. The image, a miraculous apparition, is central to Mexican culture. Her host politely responded, "God" to her question. Now her husband Bill has revealed incredible ignorance of basic biology. In this CNN interview, he stoutly maintains the embryos are not fertilized. George W....

When Democrats decided they wouldn’t let the GOP be “God’s Only Party,” they weren’t kidding. Thanks to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, none other than St. Augustine has been summoned to Denver. He was resurrected as Pelosi was trying to respond to the question that refuses to die: When does human life begin? This time, it was Tom Brokaw asking on Sunday’s Meet the Press. Citing Barack Obama’s recent pass on a similar question — “At what point does a baby get human rights?” — Brokaw asked Pelosi what she would say to Obama were he to ask her advice. Pelosi...

Enlarge ImageSweet shot. Different colors reveal sugar groups produced at different times during the development of a zebrafish embryo.Credit: Image courtesy of Carolyn R. Bertozzi Biologists have long sought chemical reactions that can home in on and alter particular molecules while leaving everything around them untouched. Their desire may soon be fulfilled. A team of chemists has developed a reaction that targets specific sugars that decorate proteins and other molecules. So far, the researchers have used the technique to study the embryonic development of zebrafish. But it could one day offer doctors better ways to deliver radioactive imaging agents...

February 11, 2008, 1:30 p.m. Embryonic DebateA Reply to William Saletan, liberal bioethics writer, former embryo.In yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, William Saletan of Slate magazine reviewed our new book Embryo:  A Defense of Human Life.  Saletan is a deservedly respected bioethics journalist. While he is a determined defender of legal abortion and the public funding of embryo-destructive research, he is not unsympathetic to the concerns of those opposed to these practices.  Unsurprisingly, then, his review of our book, though critical, was neither ungracious nor even unyielding on some important points.  Saletan praised the book’s “essential and timely...

Enlarge ImagePromising growth. (Clockwise from left) Three-, 5-, and 6-day-old cloned blastocysts. Credit: A. French et al., Stem Cells (17 January 2008) A California company reported today that it has, for the first time, cloned human embryos using DNA from adult skin cells. That's "an important first step" toward generating embryonic stem (ES) cell lines from such embryos, which can be used to study and treat diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's, says stem cell researcher George Daley of Harvard Medical School in Boston. Scientists want to be able to clone early human embryos, using cells from patients with...

Even a "Raving Atheist" Can Be Pro-Life - Interview Special to LifeSiteNews.com by Laura Freeburn Editor's Note: The following, until now unpublished, interview was conducted with the popular blog personality "the raving atheist".  The blogger, a lawyer who will not divulge his real name, has nonetheless acquired pseudonymous fame.  He is featured, as "the raving atheist" in the anti-Christian documentary film 'The God who wasn't there". His pro-life convictions are based solely on scientific evidence for the life of the unborn.  He is firmly opposed to belief in God.  The interview is published here as it provides interesting insights.Is it...

Close window Published online: 6 November 2006; | doi:10.1038/news061106-13 Technical issues provoke concern over biology paperEmbryo results prompt editorial note in Science.Erika Check Biologists are divided on when the fates of cells in an embryo are decided. SPL Nature, which publishes a Corrigendum on research from 1993 in this week's issue (see 'Data handling causes image problem for top lab'), isn't the only leading journal to put out an editorial note in recent weeks. On 27 October, Science printed an 'expression of concern'1 about a developmental-biology paper published in the journal in February2. The short statement said that "there...

Close window Published online: 21 September 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060918-10 Naturally dead embryos yield stem cells 'Stalled' embryos could be new source of cell lines.Alison Abbott The new technique could remove the need to deliberately destroy embryos for stem cells.Punchstock Researchers have succeeded in developing a human embryonic stem-cell line from an embryo that had died naturally. The development may offer a non-problematic source of embryonic cells in countries such as Germany and the United States where the law does not allow the use of cell lines whose creation caused the destruction of embryos. If the work bears fruit, researchers...

Behaviorally speaking, there's little difference between a newborn baby and a32-week-old fetus. A new wave of research suggests that the fetus can feel, dream, even enjoy The Cat in the Hat. The abortion debate may never be the same. The scene never fails to give goose bumps: the baby, just seconds old and still dewy from the womb, is lifted into the arms of its exhausted but blissful parents. They gaze adoringly as their new child stretches and squirms, scrunches its mouth and opens its eyes. To anyone watching this tender vignette, the message is unmistakable. Birth is the beginning...

Blacksburg, Va., November 3, 2004 -- In 1998, Shuhai Xiao and colleagues reported finding thousands of 600-million-year-old embryo microfossils in the Neoproterozoic Doushantuo Formation, a fossil site near Weng''an, South China (Xiao, S., Zhang, Y., and Knoll, A.H., 1998, "Three-dimensional preservation of algae and animal embryos in a Neoproterozoic phosphorite," Nature, v. 391). Within the egg cases they examined at that time, they discovered animals in the first stages of development - from a single cell to only a few dozen cells. "The cellular preservation is amazing," said Xiao, assistant professor of geosciences in the College of Science at Virginia...

Five law lords rejected the final appeal yesterday by the Pro-Life Alliance against the law that allows experiments with cloned human embryos. The alliance successfully argued in the high court in 2001 that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, which regulates research on embryos, did not cover cloned embryos produced by cell nuclear replacement (CNR), the technique used to produce Dolly the sheep. The ruling, which would have left human cloning totally unregulated, forced the government to rush through legislation banning the use of cloning to produce a baby. It also threatened to wreck the use of early-stage cloned...

I am a scientist, a human embryologist. I have spent a career in a "publish or perish" profession using a great deal of that time writing grants, hoping to get some funded to keep a research program going, as well as teaching, mostly medical students. But in 1989 I came to the conclusion that the science of Human Embryology was being rewritten according to political correctness. It was then that I decided to try to correct the revisions. Abortion, partial birth abortion, in-vitro fertilization, human fetal research, human embryo research, cloning and stem cell research are all core issues of...

Our body plan is being defined in the first few hours of life. Your world was shaped in the first 24 hours after conception. Where your head and feet would sprout, and which side would form your back and which your belly, were being defined in the minutes and hours after sperm and egg united. Just five years ago, this statement would have been heresy. Mammalian embryos were thought to spend their first few days as a featureless orb of cells. Only later, at about the time of implantation into the wall of the uterus, were cells thought to acquire...

STUDY SHOWS PLAN FOR HUMAN BODY IS LAID OUT MOMENTS AFTER CONCEPTION OXFORD, UK, July 9, 2002 (LSN.ca) - Richard Gardner, an embryologist at the University of Oxford, UK, has repeated little known experiments first conducted in the 1980s in Flushing, New York by Jean Smith of Queen's College which demonstrate that the human body is shaped beginning at the moment of conception/fertilization. Which side of the microscopic embryo will form the back and head, are not left to later development as has been believed by embryologists, but are set out in the minutes and hours after the sperm and...