Human tissue for in vitro research as an alternative to animal experiments: a charitable "honest broker" model to fulfil ethical and legal regulations and to protect research participants.

Research with human tissue offers the possibility not only of improving preclinical pharmaceutical research and safety assessment, but also of the substitution of some animal experiments. Surgically removed human tissue is discarded after pathological evaluation. This tissue would be of enormous value for research, especially in the pharmaceutical branch, if it were readily available in an ethically and legally approved manner.

Charitable State-Controlled Foundation Human Tissue and Cell Research: Ethic and Legal Aspects in the Supply of Surgically Removed Human Tissue For Research in the Academic and Commercial Sector in Germany.

Tissue engineering using human cells and tissue has one of the greatest scientific and economical potential in the coming years. There are public concerns during the ongoing discussion about future trends in life sciences and if ethic boundaries might be respected sufficiently in the course of striving for industrial profit and scientific knowledge. Until now, the legal situation of using human tissue material for research is not clear.

Reference scales for the characterization of cationic electrophiles and neutral nucleophiles.

Twenty-three diarylcarbenium ions and 38 pi-systems (arenes, alkenes, allyl silanes and stannanes, silyl enol ethers, silyl ketene acetals, and enamines) have been defined as basis sets for establishing general reactivity scales for electrophiles and nucleophiles. The rate constants of 209 combinations of these benzhydrylium ions and pi-nucleophiles, 85 of which are first presented in this article, have been subjected to a correlation analysis to determine the electrophilicity parameters E and the nucleophilicity parameters N and s as defined by the equation log k(20 degrees C) = s(N + E) (Mayr, H.; Patz, M.

Immune responses in hepatitis C virus infection.

Infection with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) commonly causes persistent disease, which may lead to cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. The pathogenesis of HCV infection is not well understood. It is most likely that both viral and host factors contribute to HCV persistence.

[Directions of an ethic in genetic engineering: evaluation of an ethic for biotechnology].

A fundamentalistic point of view is for the evaluation of genetic engineering inadequate. Using ethics to evaluate the consequences is not valid for gene transfers across species as a morally relevant criterion but is rather the assessment of toxic, pathogenic, and ecological effects of transgenic organisms. A criterion for human genetics is not the inviolability of the human embryo, but social and human tolerance and the consent of the affected.

[The relationship of analytic to biological variance--consequences for diagnosis and for the choice of laboratory tests].

The paper deals with the formal dependence of diagnostic efficiency of clinical laboratory methods from analytic error. The parameters of frequency distribution and the estimation of variance of the analytical error are taken into account. This dependence is constructed basing on an universal model for solving classification tasks using error-contaminated data.