Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Travelling Science: Testing Women

April 23rd 2006 - The Observer (UK) reported that:

"A revolutionary system for testing unborn babies for life-threatening diseases has been launched by British scientists."

In the language of ‘revolutions’ and ‘breakthroughs’, with the emotive ‘babies’, the dramas of ‘life-threatening’ etc we were brought the story that a UK team were going to provide safe (but revolutionary) foetal testing which, through the use of a blood test for the mother; 'ends risk to foetus'. Great.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1759357,00.html

In October 2005 Prof Dennis Lo, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was also providing results that could help to develop a DNA test for the foetus without invasive procedures, through blood testing the mother. Interestingly the issue of identity, and how a foetus and mother can be made to appear as separate entities in the maternal bloodstream was more visible last autumn:

"The team in Hong Kong has found a way of picking out what is baby and what is mother, by looking at a molecular biology level."

Meanwhile, in the Journal of the American Medical Association [Dhallan R et al. (2004) JAMA 291, 1114-1119] the message that foetal blood could be tested through the maternal bloodstream was news in 2004.

Mother is baby: old news