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His firm belief has always been that "the most important thing in life is having a baby, because nothing is more special than a child". Robert Edwards has worked all his life to fulfill the desire of millions of people to become parents. He is the father of in vitro fertilization and he won, 40 years after that day, the Nobel Prize for medicine.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) sentence issued on April 1st should have had much more publicity in Italy because it could give hope to many Italian couples to access the heterologous fertilization in our country, too. The Court has rejected the Austrian law that allows only the homologous in vitro fertilization, so only with parents' sperm and ova.

Sono stati eletti da pochi giorni i nuovi governatori di centrodestra e adesso, dopo non averne parlato durante la campagna elettorale, sono andati subito ad attaccare la RU486, la pillola abortiva che da ieri è distribuita anche in Italia. La pillola è in commercio da più di 20 anni in 30 paesi nel mondo e in Italia è stata autorizzata dall’Agenzia Italiana del Farmaco (Aifa) a esclusivo uso ospedaliero.

Once the working world was the natural place of adults. Today, instead, a job is a mirage and more often is a job you couldn't choose. It's just a way to try to survive and meanwhile hoping to find something better. So people sick because of work are growing. More than 4 million Italians suffer from work-related psychological-psychiatric disorders.

Do you remember dark eyes of people when someone coughed or the crowd to buy hand sanitizer (now also in the handbag size), or (in Italy) Gigio Mouse, which listed the five rules for swine flu with only four fingers: no fear, we are at the end of January and the peak of deaths was not there. Indeed, the case of swine flu was "one of the greatest health scandal of the century".

The law 40 on fertility treatment approved in 2004 amid a thousand controversies has increased the number of couples who have to migrate to conceive a child, but now it had a new interpretation by a judge of the court of Salerno.  It's not the first time that the stakes of this law have been changed by the courts, because already the Constititional Court had declared this law partially illegal.

The earthquake that struck Haiti has been particularly disastrous for its high intensity, 7.3 on the Richter scale, and especially because the epicenter was a few kilometers from the capital Port au Prince, whose center and suburbs have nearly 4 million inhabitants. If the dead will be, as is feared, more than 100,000 the earthquake could be one of the most destructive in the history of our planet.

It's a disease which is discussed less and less but it's still here: according to UNAIDS in the world there are 33.2 million people living with HIV, of these 2.5 million are children. Half of the infected are under 25 years and they die before 35. Today, all over the world, we celebrate World Day against AIDS with the aim to raise awareness against this virus and increase prevention education.

Albert Einstein fu forse la mente più splendida del XX secolo. Certo, fu un grandissimo scienziato, fu colui che, nel giro di un mese, produsse quattro articoli che sconvolsero e cambiarono per sempre il mondo della fisica. Einstein fu, sin da ragazzino, un ribelle. All'età di diciotto anni, aiutato dal padre, rinunciò alla cittadinanza tedesca, in quanto non voleva assolutamente prestare il servizio di leva. La sua non era affatto codardia, semmai era la manifestazione di un tratto caratteriale che lo porterai poi ad eccellere nel mondo della scienza, e non solo: il rifiuto per l'autorità, per il dogma, per il conformismo.

For the first time in medicine history, researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine were able to obtain germ cells (the reproductive founders of oocytes and sperm cells) from human embryonic cells.