Embryo Cloning Milestone, IRS Chief Quits, Christie's Record Breaking Auction – News 5/16/13


Embryo Cloning Milestone, IRS Chief Quits, Christie’s Record Breaking Auction – News 5/16/13

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    Today in the News:
    – The US IRS chief quits over conservative tax scrutiny scandal
    – Milestone in medical human ‘cloning’ has been reached
    – And a Christie’s art sale becomes ‘highest in auction history’

    The head of the US tax agency, Steve Miller, has quit after it emerged his staff singled out conservative groups for extra scrutiny. the House judiciary committee that it would take time for the FBI to determine if any laws had been broken by IRS personnel. President Obama finds the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, was “inexcusable” and vowed that t will not happen again. The president said the treasury department would also put in place new safeguards to “make sure this kind of behavior cannot happen again”.

    US scientists say, human cloning has been used to produce early embryos, marking a “significant step” for medicine. The cloned embryos were used as a source of stem cells, which can make new heart muscle, bone, brain tissue or any other type of cell in the body. Stem cells are one of the great hopes for medicine. Being able to create new tissue might be able to heal the damage caused by a heart attack or repair a severed spinal cord. Using a novel method, a team at the Oregon Health and Science University have developed an embryo in the lab, to the blastocyst stage – which is around 150 cells – and is enough to provide a source of embryonic stem cells. Opponents, however, argue that all embryos, whether created in the lab or not, have the potential to go on to become a fully-fledged human, and as such it is morally wrong to experiment on them, and strongly advocate the use of stem cells from adult tissue.

    A contemporary art sale at Christie’s in New York has made $495m, the highest total in auction history. The sale included works by Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The sale established 16 new world auction records, with nine works selling for more than $10m and 23 for more than $5m. I guess for some, the financial crisis is over now, with Christie’s saying that these records reflected “a new era in the art market”. The top winner of Wednesday’s sale was Pollock’s drip painting Number 19, 1948, sold for $58.4m – nearly twice its pre-sale estimate. Christie’s described the $495 total – which included commissions – as “staggering”. Only four of the 70 works on offer went unsold.

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