JULY marked the 25th birthday of Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby. For those of us who can’t remember a world without IVF, it is astonishing to read about the intense controversy her birth caused. Nowadays, reproductive researchers have to work rather harder to shock.
Plenty succeeded this year, though. A picture of a bunny-eared man-rabbit was how one British tabloid reported a Chinese team’s claim to have grown embryos created by transferring the genomes of human cells to rabbit eggs. Outrage also greeted the news that a Chinese woman had been pregnant with embryos created by transferring the nucleus…
