Faculty Bibliography

Mary Shearing and her 32-year-old husband, Don, created the twins using eggs donated by a woman in her 20s. The eggs were then fertilized using a process known as in-vitro fertilization

Modern medicine has learned how to use drugs to stimulate egg production. Women who reach menopause can no longer produce eggs. But even older women who can still make eggs with hormone therapy often encounter problems getting pregnant. Pregnancies from older eggs show much higher rates of birth defects and spontaneous abortion

Writing in the journal Social Science and Medicine, Post looks closely at the most recent edition of the "bible" of the field of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, to see how it deals with religious belief and practices. The manual is the standard reference work for practitioners in the U.S. for the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness

It is here that the huge rinds of pale yellow Swiss are injected with bacteria and then stored in cellars so that the gas the bacteria produces as a by-product of fermentation can riddle the slab with the trademark holes

Suppose you and your spouse were very short. What if you found out that there was a new treatment, a hormone, that could alter your children's chemistry so that they would be taller than you. Would you want your child's height "treated?"

When the baboon liver transplant was being done, I was in Strasbourg, France, at an international conference of experts in xenografting. Some of the surgeons there said that they would accept into their programs patients dying from liver failure as a result of hepatitis. A few of the surgeons and scientists who were there expressed skepticism about whether or not a baboon liver was vulnerable to hepatitis infection, but many thought the odds were probably lower

Geoffrey Fieger, [Jack Kevorkian]'s lawyer, originally denied that Kevorkian took any active role in causing [Susan Williams]' death earlier this month. But he subsequently changed his tune. He now says it was Dr. Jack who purchased a canister of carbon monoxide gas, brought it to Susan Williams' home and counselled her about how to gas herself to death

[Steven Allen Butler] was facing a life sentence for repeatedly raping a 13- year-old girl last year. He previously had been convicted of molesting a seven-year-old. Butler is very bad news

The researchers studied the reported prevalence of homosexuality in a large number of identical and non-identical twin brothers of self-proclaimed gay men. They also looked at the sexual orientation of adopted brothers of gay men. Fifty-two per cent of the identical twins said they, like their brothers, were gay. Twenty-two per cent of the non-identical twins reported being gay, while only 11 per cent of adopted brothers of gay men said they were homosexuals

The writer is director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota and a columnist for the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press