We Are Awake

Scientists in  China  have created the first monkeys cloned by the same process that produced  Dolly the sheep  more than 20 years ago, a breakthrough that could boost medical research into human diseases.The two long-tailed  macaques  (Macaca fascicularis) named Hua Hua and Zhong Zhong were born at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai, and are the fruits of years of research into a cloning technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer."The barrier has been broken by this work," co-author Muming Poo, director of the Institute of Neuroscience of CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, told  AFP. Until now, the technique has been used to clone more than 20 different animal species, including dogs, pigs and cats, but primates have proven particularly difficult.The birth of the now six and eight-week-old macaque babies also raises ethical questions about how close scientists ha...

Doctors at Bai Jerbai Wadia Hospital in Parel,Mumbai,India extracted an LED bulb from the lung of a seven-month-old girl who had swallowed it while playing with a toy mobile phone. The bulb was two-centimetre in diametre. Ariba Khan, whose family is from Chiplun in Ratnagiri district, had to wait for a week before the doctors could perform a bronchoscopy to remove the object as physicians in Ratnagiri couldn’t diagnose why she had persistent cough and fever. Unaware of the incident, her parents took her to doctors in Ratnagiri to treat the cough and fever. “The parents initially thought that Ariba had swallowed a thread or a small part of a toy. They took her to a local physician who couldn’t diagnose the condition. Her condition deteriorated within a week,” said doctors from the hospital. After being advised by relatives, the family admitted the child to Wadia Hospital. Dr Divya Prabhat, head of ENT department at the hospital, said an X-Ray report revealed that there was a...