My lede:

The board that administers New York’s stem cell research funding program recently approved using state money to pay women who donate fresh oocytes for an experimental technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, also known as therapeutic cloning.

The policy makes New York the first American government body, state or federal, to use taxpayer dollars to do more than reimburse egg donors for direct expenses incurred in donating. Opponents of the move said it would encourage women to undertake a painful, sometimes risky procedure for speculative research.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

The Food and Drug Administration in January 2008 advised parents to avoid giving over-the-counter cough and cold medicines to children younger than 2 because potential overdosing risks outweigh the symptom-relieving benefits. But a new study found that many parents are confused by medication labels that say “infant” or display child-friendly graphics such as pictures of teddy bears.

The whole shebang.

My lede:

Apple Inc., maker of devices such as the iPod and the iPhone, is headquartered in Cupertino, Calif. The company’s CEO, Steve Jobs, lives in the area. Yet when Jobs needed a transplant to replace his liver, diseased by the spread of pancreatic cancer, the iconic Silicon Valley executive did not get his new organ at nearby Stanford University Medical Center — or anywhere else in California.

Instead, he traveled more than 2,000 miles to Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute in Memphis, Tenn., where the wait list for a liver is about 80% shorter, according to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing. The median wait for a man Jobs’ age to receive a liver in the organ-allocation region where Memphis is located is 543 days — about a third the wait time of Jobs’ home California region.

The case highlights longstanding regional disparities in wait lists for life-saving transplants and has reignited debate over how a few well-to-do patients are able to register as potential recipients at distant centers to better their odds of getting an organ. These inequities in the nation’s organ-allocation system should be addressed, say transplant physicians and medical ethicists.

The whole shebang.