An eight-year old British girl of Indian descent was allegedly murdered by health care workers in India so they could harvest her organs, her grieving parents claim. (International Business Times)

An increasing number of childless Asian couples are travelling to India for fertility treatment because of a shortage of south Asian egg donors in the UK. (BBC)

A study finds a gap between learning ethical terms and using them in a clinical setting, which can lead to a lack of shared understanding. (American Medical News)

The World Health Organization’s annual statistics show progress is being made around the world in cutting child mortality - but it will miss its target of a two-thirds reduction by 2015. (BBC)

The adoptive parents of a child born with male and female organs say South Carolina mutilated their son by choosing a gender and having his male genitalia surgically removed. (CNN)

Nine women have registered with Japan’s first “ovum bank” to donate their eggs to help infertile women, paving the way for fertility treatment to begin within the year at the earliest, a private group said Monday. (The Japan Times)

The Strasbourg, France-based court said Switzerland must specify whether its laws are meant to include people not suffering from terminal illnesses and, if so, spell out the conditions under which they can end their lives. (Washington Post)

The villain in “Inferno,” Brown’s sixth novel, follows a movement called transhumanism. Brown, 48, who spent more than two years in Florence researching the book, has been interested in the controversial concept of transhumanism for years. (Today)

Epigenetic modifications play a major role in cell differentiation, helping to determine which genes are transcribed in divergent cell lines. But it is difficult to observe the DNA of individual cells of an embryo during development. A paper published in Cell last week (May 9) follows embryonic stem cells as they differentiate, showing that cells display different epigenetic modifications depending on their developmental stage. (The Scientist)

A woman who was the first to have a successful womb transplant from a dead donor has had her pregnancy terminated after the embryo showed no heart beat, doctors in Turkey said on Tuesday. (Fox News)

In a secular age it might seem that the time for moral authorities has passed. However, research in the life sciences and biomedicine has produced a range of moral concerns and prompted the emergence of bioethics; an area of study that specialises in the ethical analysis of these issues. The result has been the emergence of what we might call expert bioethicists, a cadre of professionals who, while logical and friendly, have, nevertheless, been ordained as secular priests. (The Guardian)

Vermont is poised to become the third U.S. state to allow doctor-assisted suicide, after its legislature passed a bill allowing physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to terminally ill patients. (Reuters)

The US adolescents who signed up for the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) in the 1970s were the smartest of the smart, with mathematical and verbal-reasoning skills within the top 1% of the population. Now, researchers at BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) in Shenzhen, China, the largest gene-sequencing facility in the world, are searching for the quirks of DNA that may contribute to such gifts. (Nature)

Advanced genetic engineering is already changing vaccine development and could make inroads into other branches of medicine. (MIT Technology Review)

The clinical study demonstrates for the first time that the India-developed rotavirus vaccine ROTAVAC- is efficacious in preventing severe rotavirus diarrhoea in low-resource settings in India. ROTAVAC- significantly reduced severe rotavirus diarrhoea by more than half-56 percent during the first year of life, with protection continuing into the second year of life. Moreover, the vaccine also showed impact against severe diarrhoea of any cause. (News-Medical)

Dr. Tria may be an outlier, but gifts and payments to physicians from drug and medical device companies have been rampant in medicine for decades. Over a two-and-a-half-year period, device and drug companies shelled out over $76 million just to physicians licensed in Massachusetts, according to a study published online this month in The New England Journal of Medicine. That amount does not include outlays of less than $50, which are exempt from disclosure. (New York Times)

MY MOTHER fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was. (New York Times, op-ed by Angelina Jolie)

Thinking about cancer as an ecosystem is giving biologists access to a new armoury of mathematical tools for tackling it, such as evolutionary game theory. (MIT Technology Review)

Revenge plastic surgery is becoming more common. A 2011 survey by the Transform Plastic Surgery Group in the United Kingdom found that over a quarter (26%) of their patients were recently divorced women, while 11% were newly single men. (CNN)

A doctor who was responsible for cutting the spines of babies after botched abortions was convicted Monday of three counts of first-degree murder in a case that became a sharp rallying cry for anti-abortion activists. (New York Times)