THE news that researchers in the US and Japan have successfully reprogrammed ordinary skin cells to become stem cells which can be used potentially to cure various diseases should be welcomed with enthusiasm by one and all. These skin stem cells are capable of pluripotency, that is to say they have the capacity to develop into any of several hundred different cell types.

ON the issue of animal rights, I agree with Margaret Twohig (Letters, April 23) that we have a long way to go before we measure up to Gandhi’s idea of a moral nation.

IN 2001 Galway For Life sought to highlight allegations that the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), an organisation that the Government financially supports, had in the late 1990s been involved in a campaign of compulsory sterilisation of over 100,000 Peruvian women.