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Politics : Clinton -- doomed & wagging, Japan collapses, Y2K bug, etc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SOROS who wrote (630)	10/13/1998 4:18:00 PM
From: SOROS	Respond to of 1151

Inside China Today - 10/13/98 BEIJING, Oct. 13, 1998 -- (Agence France Presse) China insisted Tuesday, ahead of a landmark top level meeting between Beijing and Taipei, that it will not renounce its right to use force to reunify with Taiwan. "We are trying to reach a peaceful reunification of the motherland, but we do not commit to give up military means," Foreign Ministry spokesman Tang Guoqiang told a news briefing. "This is not directed against our compatriots in Taiwan. This is directed instead at foreign interference in the internal affairs of China," Tang added. Koo Chen-fu, chairman of Taiwan's semi-official Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) is due in China on Wednesday to hold talks with his mainland counterpart Wang Daohan. Koo and Wang, the chairman of the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), met for the first time in Singapore in 1993 to try to bring together the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, which separated since the end of a bitter civil war in 1949. The historic meeting launched negotiations which China broke off three years ago after Taiwan's President Lee Teng-hui visited the United States, in what the mainland saw as a pro-independence bid. China staged war games off Taiwan then in a bid to warn the island against going it alone. Beijing views the nationalist island as a renegade province and worked to strangle any moves seen to be encouraging independence. Tang said that after Koo's visit, ARATS and SEF, would make further and specific arrangements for personal exchanges between the two sides of the Strait. "As to a meeting between the leaders of the two sides of the Strait, we have always welcomed the visits of the leaders of the Taiwan authorities in an appropriate capacity. "We are also willing to accept the invitation of the Taiwan side to visit Taiwan," he said. On the possibility of Lee visiting the mainland, Tang said China had "indicated on many occasions that Taiwan leaders should come back to the 'one China' principle and adopt effective measures to promote the development of cross strait relations." He said that only in so doing could the visit be of realistic significance.

To: SOROS who wrote (630)	10/13/1998 4:25:00 PM
From: SOROS	Respond to of 1151

New Fertility Technique Shakes Ethical Ground Experiments Combine Genes From 2 Women By Rick Weiss Washington Post Service SAN FRANCISCO - Using a technique similar to the one that Scottish scientists used to clone Dolly the sheep, doctors in New York have for the first time transferred genes from an infertile woman's egg into another egg, fertilized it with sperm, and placed the resulting embryo in the womb in the hope of growing a baby. The new approach, which could allow infertile women to have babies with some of their own genes, does not constitute cloning, since any resulting child would have genes from a father as well as a mother. But it is similar enough to cloning to be illegal in California and perhaps in other states where broadly worded anti-cloning legislation has been passed, said Dr. Jamie Grifo of New York University, who is leading the experiments. The work breaks new ethical ground by being the first to mix significant amounts of DNA from two women's eggs into a single egg. That means any resulting child will have two genetic mothers - although one woman contributes vastly more than the other and so will clearly be the dominant biological mother. Dr. Grifo described the novel approach here Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Experts said the research offered evidence that in the fast-paced field of reproductive medicine the line between promising therapeutic techniques and ethically questionable genetic manipulations is getting blurrier every day. Until now, for example, most researchers have said they are adamantly opposed to making human genetic alterations that would be passed on to future generations. By combining genes from two different women, however - albeit in a small degree - the new method does exactly that. ''For the child and family, it raises questions of what bloodline means and what kinship means,'' said John Robertson, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Texas in Austin. ''I think in this case that's O.K.,'' but it shows that the line is ''not sacrosanct.'' Dr. Grifo said he and his colleagues, John Zhang and Hui Liu, had tried the method in two infertile women so far. The first one, a 47-year-old, failed to become pregnant. The second woman, 44, underwent the procedure just last week and is not scheduled to have a pregnancy test until next week. The team has permission from the university's scientific and ethics advisory board to try the technique in five women. ''There are a lot of concerns about this, a lot of issues,'' Dr. Grifo said. ''But it's not like we did this thoughtlessly.'' The goal, Dr. Grifo emphasized, is to provide an alternative to infertile women. Today, the only options for these women are adoption or the creation of a baby through in vitro fertilization using a donated egg. Many cases of female infertility are caused by an inability to produce eggs. But many others, including among most older premenopausal women, involve eggs that are defective. The method used by the New York team is based on scientists' growing recognition that in many of these cases the problem is not with the DNA inside a woman's eggs but with the fluid, called cytoplasm, that surrounds that DNA. This suggests that their DNA could be viable in reproduction if it could be drenched in healthier cytoplasm. In the new work, the researchers removed the main mass of DNA, called the nucleus, from the infertile woman's egg and injected it into the healthy donor's egg whose nucleus had already been removed. When the reconstituted egg was mixed with sperm in the laboratory, it began to grow into an embryo that the doctors then placed in the infertile woman's womb. By contrast, cloning involves the transfer of nuclear DNA not from an egg but from a body cell, such as a skin cell, and into an egg in which the DNA has been removed. Body cells contain a full complement of DNA inherited from two parents, so no fertilization by sperm is required. A jolt of electricity is enough to get such a reconstituted egg cell to divide as though it were an embryo. Cloning has worked in sheep and mice but has not been attempted in people. The ethical catch in Dr. Grifo's work is that there are also some genes, called mitochondrial genes, that reside in the cytoplasm of every egg. Any baby born by his technique will have nuclear genes from the infertile woman and mitochondrial genes from the healthy donor. Mitochondrial genes are not generally considered to have an obvious impact on how a person looks or behaves. But they do play a major role in various metabolic pathways in the body and, when mutated, are known to cause various inherited diseases. They may play a role in such common ailments as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Some experts at the meeting also questioned the ethics of conducting the experiments in women without first testing their safety in monkeys. ''Animal colonies cost a fortune to maintain,'' Dr. Grifo replied. And because of a ban on federal grant money for embryo research, he said, ''we have no research dollars.'' In the current studies, the women undergoing the experimental treatment paid part of the cost of the procedure; the rest was absorbed by the NYU clinic. It took two years for the scientists to get permission from NYU's research review board to conduct the studies. Dr. Grifo would not elaborate on what aspects of the research troubled the board. iht.com