Profile Articles Activity Joyce Harper is Professor of Human Genetics and Embryology at University College London in the Institute for Womens Health where she is head of the Reproductive Health Department, Principal Investigator of the Embryology, IVF and Reproductive Genetics Group, Director of Education and Director of two MSc programmes - Prenatal Genetics and Fetal Medicine and Reproductive Science and Womens Health. She has been working in the fields of IVF and reproductive genetics since 1987 and written over 170 scientific papers and published two textbooks. Her research includes preimplantation genetic diagnosis, factors affecting preimplantation development, comparison of in vivo and in vitro development, differences in culture media, embryo selection methods, sperm DNA damage and social and ethical issues surrounding IVF and reproductive genetics including gamete donation, surrogacy, social egg freezing, religious views to ART and fertility education and awareness. Joyce is passionate about public engagement to discuss all aspects of womens health, including wellbeing. She has established a public engagement group with daily posts http://www.globalwomenconnected.com. Joyce is writing a book covering womens health from birth to death. She is deputy chair of the UK Fertility Education Initiative, trying to improve fertility awareness in the UK and a member of … Continue reading →

The work on the repair of a gene in human eggs, reported in the journal Nature, is an important scientific achievement. It made use of Crispr (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology to make a single specific change in the three billion units of the human genome. The work is indeed a stunning application of Crispr, with some elegant and surprising results and the publicity is good for my science but it is not likely to change the way reproductive medical genetics is practised and it raises no new ethical problems. The claims made for the work, amplified by the media, will raise expectations in families carrying genes with severe medical effects and has already excited the critics who fear that geneticists are busy undermining our society. So let us first look at what has been achieved in the science, and then tease out some of the implications. Medical genetic disorders cause a great deal of suffering and affect about one person in 25. Genetic engineering and DNA sequencing invented in the 1970s led to a revolution in genetics. Mutant genes causing many genetic disorders have been identified. Advances in human embryology led to in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) in 1978, … Continue reading →

Whats the weight? Jenny Elia Pfeiffer/Getty By Jessica Hamzelou SINCE the first test tube baby arrived 39 years ago, an estimated 6.5 million children have been born thanks to IVF and similar techniques. But we are only just starting to learn about the long-term health of people conceived using assisted reproduction techniques (ART), who may have a higher risk of obesity in later life. Today, 1 in every 30 babies in Japan is conceived by ART, says Tomoya Hasegawa of Tokyo Medical University. These babies are usually healthy, but tend to have a lower birth weight. Large studies that didnt look at conception method have previously found that low birth weight is linked to adult obesity and diabetes. To investigate further, Heleen Zandstra of Maastricht Medical Centre, the Netherlands, and her team have been comparing the effects of using two different culture media to support the growth of early IVF embryos. Earlier they had found that one of these was associated with babies that were 112 grams lighter at birth than those beginning life in the other medium. Thats a big difference, considering babies only weigh about 3 kilograms, says Zandstra. Advertisement Now the team have followed up on these … Continue reading →