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| IVF pioneer wins Nobel prize for medicine Robert Edwards, the British scientist who pioneered IVF, was responsible for the conception of Louise Brown, the world's first test-tube babyThe Nobel prize for physiology or medicine for 2010 has been awarded to the British scientist who pioneered in-vitro fertilisation, a procedure that has helped in the conception and birth of 4 million people around the world since the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown in 1978.Robert Edwards, a Manchester-born physiologist, received the 10m Swedish-kronor prize in an announcement today by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. Edwards developed the IVF technique in a research career that started in 1958 at the National Institute for Medical Research in London and continued at the world's first IVF centre, the Bourn Hall Clinic in Cambridge, founded with the English surgeon, Patrick Steptoe.Edwards was born in 1925 in Manchester and, serving in the army in the second world war, studied biology at the University of Wales in Bangor and at Edinburgh University. At the latter, he worked on a PhD in 1955 studying the development of embryos in mice. He is currently an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge.Robert Edward's wife, Ruth, and his family said in a statement today that they were "thrilled and delighted" at the award of the Nobel Prize. "The success of this research has touched the lives of millions of people worldwide. His dedication and single-minded determination, despite opposition from many quarters, has led to the successful application of his pioneering research."Worldwide around one in 10 couples are infertile and, until IVF was developed, doctors could do little to help these couples have children. Before Edwards began his work in the 1950s, scientists had shown that egg cells from rabbits could be fertilised outside the body, if they were mixed with sperm in test tubes. It took almost two decades of basic scientific study of the life cycle of human eggs before Edwards and his colleagues, in 1969, were able to successfully fertilise them outside the human body.Speaking in 2008, Edwards recalled the moment he first created a fertilised human embryo in 1968. "I'll never get forget the day I looked down the microscope and saw something funny in the cultures. I looked down the microscope and what I saw was a human blastocyst gazing up at me. I thought: 'We've done it.'""The most important thing in life is having a child," he said. "Nothing is more special than a child. Steptoe and I were deeply affected by the desperation felt by couples who so wanted to have children. We had a lot of critics but we fought like hell for our patients."Working with Steptoe, who helped pioneer laparoscopy or "keyhole surgery", Edwards removed eggs from ovaries, put them in culture and then added sperm. A decade of research followed before the birth of the world's first test-tube baby on 25 July 1978.Lesley and John Brown had come to Edwards and Steptoe at Bourn Hall Clinic in the late 1970s, after nine years of failed attempts to have a child. Edwards and Steptoe carried out the IVF technique on one of Mrs Brown's eggs and then re-implanted it after it had become an embryo consisting of eight cells. Louise was born by caesarean section after a full-term pregnancy.Responding to the prize announcement, Louise Brown said: "It's fantastic news, me and mum are so glad that one of the pioneers of IVF has been given the recognition he deserves. We hold Bob in great affection and are delighted to send our personal congratulations to him and his family at this time.""During the 1950s, Edwards came to realise the potential of IVF as a treatment for this medical condition," said Christer Höög, professor of cell biology at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and a member of the Nobel Assembly. "What inspired him to take on this challenge was his research on how hormones control critical ovarian functions in mice, such as oocyte maturation and ovulation. By a brilliant combination of basic and applied medical research, Edwards overcame one technical hurdle after another in his persistence to discover a method that would help to alleviate infertility. He was the first to show that human oocytes could undergo in-vitro maturation, as well as fertilisation in-vitro. He was also the first to show that in-vitro fertilised human oocytes could give rise to early-stage embryos and blastocysts."Three decades on, IVF is an established technique to help infertile couples have children. There have been many advances on Edwards' initial research: a single sperm can now be injected directly into an egg and the extraction of eggs from ovaries has been improved so that it causes less trauma. IVF is also at the centre of a technique, called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), that screens fertilised embryos for genetic conditions such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease."This discovery represents a monumental medical advance that can truly be said to confer the 'greatest benefit to mankind'. Human IVF has radically changed the field of reproductive medicine. Today, 2% to 3% of all newborns in many countries are conceived with the help of IVF and many individuals that turn to an infertility clinic can be helped," Höög said. "IVF has also opened up new ways to treat many forms of male infertility. The development of IVF recognised by this year's Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has touched the life of millions of infertile people, giving them an opportunity to have children."Steptoe, who contributed significantly to the work of developing IVF, died in 1988 and therefore cannot be jointly awarded with Edwards. The statutes of the Nobel Foundation stipulate that a prize cannot be awarded posthumously, unless the winner dies after the announcement of the prize itself.Basil Tarlatzis of the International Federation of Fertility Societies, said: "This is a well deserved honour. IVF has opened new avenues of hope for millions of couples throughout the world. It has also had an immense impact on our understanding of medicine, leading directly to such developments as stem cell research, PGD, and many other fields. Edwards and Steptoe were real pioneers, and the award of the Nobel prize honours not just their work, but the whole field of reproductive science. After their breakthrough work, Robert went on to nurture the development of the assisted reproduction. No one deserves this award more, and we congratulate him on his award."Martin Johnson, professor of reproductive sciences at the University of Cambridge, said he was delighted. "This is long overdue. We nominated him for the Lasker award 10 years ago and he got it immediately so we couldn't understand why the Nobel has come so late, but he is delighted – this is the cherry on the cake for him. Bob's work has always been controversial but he has never shrunk from confronting that controversy. He was a real visionary, and always ahead of his time on so many issues – not just IVF – but also on PGD in the 60s, stem cells in the 70s, and the whole process of thinking ethically."Allan Pacey, a senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield said: "I am absolutely delighted and overwhelmed to hear this news and it is long, long overdue. Bob was a visionary and worked hard to develop IVF in a time when so many were against him. It is a tribute to his tenacity that he persevered in his research and as a consequence has changed the lives of millions across the world. My only sadness is that Bob's failing health may mean that he is less able to enjoy this award than he once was. This is a great day for him."Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, said: "The work of Professor Edwards exemplifies the ethos of the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science, and of scientists everywhere - applying visionary, extraordinary research to change the lives of people all over the world. The Royal Society is delighted to congratulate him as he joins the numerous other Fellows of the Society to receive this remarkable accolade."Nobel prizesPeople in scienceScience prizesFertility problemsMedical researchReproductionBiologyEmbryos and stem cellsHealthHealth & wellbeingAlok Jhaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
High Court test case to keep Islamic preacher Zakir Naik out of Britain A Christian minister is bringing a legal test case to try to prevent a radical Islamic preacher coming to Britain. telegraph.co.uk |
The Daily Mail cancer story that torpedoes itself in paragraph 19 Studies of newspaper readers show that a late caveat is not enoughYou will be familiar with the Daily Mail's ongoing project to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into ones that either cause or prevent cancer. Individual entries are now barely worth documenting, and the phenomenon is best appreciated in bulk through websites such as the Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project and Kill Or Cure, with its alphabetised list: from almonds, apples and artificial light; through horseradish, hot drinks and housework; to wasabi, water, watercress and more.Occasionally one story pops up to illustrate a wider issue, and "Strict diet two days a week 'cuts risk of breast cancer by 40%' " is a good example. It goes on: "A strict diet for two days a week consisting solely of vegetables, fruit, milk and a mug of Bovril could prevent breast cancer, scientists say."Now, if you have the time to track down the academic paper this news article is describing, from the October edition of the International Journal of Obesity, you will immediately discover that it is not a study of breast cancer, and it does not find that the risk of cancer is reduced by 40% (although it does measure a couple of hormones). The press release wasn't exactly a masterpiece of clarity either, as Cancer Research UK's excellent science blog immediately pointed out, but in any case, the study doesn't measure breast cancer as an outcome at all.But if I were to leave it there, then the journalist would correctly complain: because after all the grand and misleading claims, firstly, in the body of the piece, they do mention that the outcome is not cancer, but some hormones related to cancer (with no explanation of how tenuous that relationship is). Then, finally, at the very bottom of the piece, they have the reality. Although it's not spoken in the authoritative third person of the paper itself, it's there, in a quote, at paragraph 19. "But Dr Julie Sharp, senior science information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: 'This study is not about breast cancer, it's a study showing how different diet patterns affect weight loss and it's misleading to draw any conclusions about breast cancer from this research.' "The late caveat, torpedoing the central premise of a news piece, is a common strategy in many newspapers. But what use is this information, at the end of a long article, in paragraph 19?The way that people read newspapers has been studied widely using eyetracking technology. It's through this that we discover, for example, that when presented with a full-length photograph of a man, men are more likely to look at the penis area than women.Most of this research is more preoccupied with ads than news, because research in so many fields is funded by people with both questions and money – page top left is best, probably – but there is plenty of useful stuff, much of it by the Poynter Institute. They did an early study in 1990, finding some predictable stuff: that photos attract attention; eyes travel from the dominant photo to the biggest headline, then teasers, and finally text; text is read the least, headlines the most, and so on.Their most recent project was far bigger: they took a representative sample of 582 people from four cities in the US, and invited them in to read a newspaper and website as they normally would, wearing the eyetracking equipment, over five days in 2006, for 15 minutes each. This yielded a dataset of more than 102,000 eye stops.This is what they found: by the time you get to a story length of eight to 11 paragraphs, on average, your readers read only half the story. A minority will make it to paragraph 19, where a fraction of the readers of the Daily Mail would have discovered that the central premise of the news story – that a trial had found a 40% reduction in cancer through intermittent dieting – was false.Caveats in paragraph 19 are common. This evidence strongly suggests that they are also a sop: they permit a defence against criticism, through the strictest, most rigorous analysis of a piece. But if your interest is informing a reader, they are plainly misleading.CancerCancerDaily MailBen Goldacreguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Warning over '15ft' seaside waves Coastal rescuers say the sea off the coast of Redcar will be a no-go area because of predicted 15ft waves. bbc.co.uk |
Pride, prejudice and poor punctuation Jane Austen is renowned as a pristine literary stylist; but her semicolons were not her own – instead she scattered dashes through her prose, reveals new research by an Oxford professorThe truth universally acknowledged, that Jane Austen was one of the most pristine literary stylists of all time, has been exploded: her punctuation was erratic, her use of capital letters eclectic and her paragraph breaks often nonexistent.The Austen myth was fuelled by her brother Henry in 1818, a year after her death: "Everything came finished from her pen," he wrote.She compared her own technique to a miniaturist, "the little bit of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush".In fact much of the credit for her elegant prose must go to publisher's reader and editor William Gifford, according to an academic who has compared the manuscripts and the published versions line by line.Gifford, a much more obscure figure who was said to be shy and awkward, polished up Austen's manuscripts, smoothing out the style, regularising the punctuation, introducing the famous exquisitely placed semicolons and eliminating her blizzards of dashes."Does it make her less of a genius?" said Professor Kathryn Sutherland of the English language and literature faculty at Oxford University."I don't think so," she said, answering her own question. "Indeed I think it makes her more interesting, and a much more modern and innovative writer than had been thought."In particular, her use of dashes to heighten the emotional impact of what she is writing is striking: you have to wait for Virginia Woolf to see anything comparable."Her dashes did not please Gifford, the reader and editor for Jane Austen's final publisher, John Murray, who also worked with Lord Byron, another of Murray's star authors who liked to use dashes by the fistful.In 1815 Gifford wrote to Murray, who was thinking of acquiring the rights to Mansfield Park and Emma: "I have read the Novel, and like it much – I was sure, before I rec'd your letter, that the writer was the author of P. & Prejudice &c. I know not its value, but if you can procure it, it will certainly sell well. It is very carelessly copied, though the handwriting is excellently plain, & there are many short omissions which must be inserted. I will readily correct the proof for you, & may do it a little good here & there."In another letter he urged Murray to try also for the rights to Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813 by Thomas Egerton: "I have lately read it again – tis very good – wretchedly printed in some places, & so pointed as to be unintelligible."In poring over 1,100 manuscript Austen pages – often on tiny homemade notebooks – for an online archive of all the manuscripts scattered in 1845 by her sister Cassandra's will, Sutherland has discovered an author quite different from the cool, ironic, detached stylist of legend.Drastic editing for publication was standard practice and Sutherland has found no evidence that Austen objected."Her style is much more intimate and relaxed, more conversational," said Sutherland."Her punctuation is much more sloppy, more like the kind of thing our students do and we tell them not to."She uses capital letters and underlining to emphasise the words she thinks important, in a manner that takes us closer to the speaking voice than the printed page."In taking them away, it becomes more grammatical and sophisticated – but something has been lost."Jane AustenVirginia WoolfLord ByronPublishingUniversity of OxfordHigher educationMaev Kennedyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |