TASK DEFINITION: Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.
PROBLEM: An analysis of canines at Britain’s Crufts show - held annually since the reign of Queen Victoria - found 74 percent were in ideal condition but 26 percent were overweight. None of the animals studied were underweight, researchers from the University of Liverpool reported in the journal Veterinary Record. The team reached their conclusions after studying 1,000 images of 28 dog breeds placed between first and fifth in their class during competitions from 2001 to 2013. The issue was most pronounced in certain breeds, with 80 percent of pugs, 68 percent of Basset hounds and 63 percent of Labradors proving excessively fat. While obesity at Crufts is still less common than in the general pet population, researcher Alex German said the proportion of overweight animals was a concern because show dogs were assumed to be perfect specimens of their breed. Obesity causes significant health problems in dogs, including arthritis and diabetes.

SOLUTION: One in four dogs at top show Crufts found to be overweight.

PROBLEM: Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s top medical adviser, Chris Whitty, said on Wednesday that data on the extent and impact of the outbreak was encouraging but that it was too soon to focus the next phase of the government’s response. “Our view is that it is probably reaching the peak overall,” Whitty said at the government’s daily news conference. “We are not yet at the point where we can say confidently and safely ‘this is now past the peak and we can start thinking very much now about the next phases.’”  So far, more than 12,868 people with COVID-19 have died in British hospitals, though new official data indicates the true death toll could be much larger. Whitty said the daily number of deaths could rise in coming days due reporting lags. The government is widely expected to announce on Thursday that it will extend the most far-reaching restrictions on daily life in Britain’s peacetime history. But Johnson had initially refrained from approving the stringent controls that other European leaders imposed. He later closed down the country when projections showed a quarter of a million people could die in the United Kingdom. The leader of the opposition Labour Party, Keir Starmer, said the prime minister had initially been too slow to impose the lockdown, signalling the political row that is likely to dominate the national discourse for years to come. “I am worried that it looks like we are going to have a higher death rate than any other country in Europe and there will obviously be searching questions about why that has happened,” Starmer told LBC radio. “I did think the government was going too slowly,” Starmer said. “We will have to look back in due course.”  A widespread lockdown came into force on March 23. Prior to that the Conservative government had urged people not to make unnecessary journeys and to cut down on socialising, rather than closing establishments down. But Britons had still packed pubs and restaurants, and even the Cheltenham horse-racing event went ahead, bringing together thousands of punters. Johnson even joked about shaking hands with medical staff during a hospital visit. Starmer, a 57-year-old former prosecutor who won the Labour Party leadership earlier this month, also called on the government to publish its exit strategy from lockdown restrictions. Foreign minister Dominic Raab, who is deputising for Johnson while he recovers from COVID-19, will lead a cabinet meeting on Thursday morning, and in the afternoon chair an emergency response committee meeting to decide on extending the lockdown   The United Kingdom’s hospital death toll from COVID-19 rose by 761 to 12,868 as of 1600 on April 14, the health ministry said. The toll had gone up by 778 the previous day. The official British death toll is the fifth-highest globally after the United States, Italy, Spain and France. The United States has reported more than 28,000 deaths while Italy has reported more than 21,000. Several European countries have announced plans or already begun to relax restrictions, balancing the risk of reversing gains against further damage to battered economies. Starmer said Labour supported extending the measures in Britain but that to “maintain morale and hope”, the public needed to have an idea of what is coming next. Government officials have defended their course of action regarding the start of the lockdown and said it would be a mistake to talk about how to end the lockdown before they were confident the peak had been reached. Amid the doom, though, there were rays of hope. A 106-year-old woman, thought to be the oldest patient in Britain to beat the novel coronavirus, was discharged from hospital. Connie Titchen, born in 1913, had battled suspected pneumonia and COVID-19. A 99-year-old war veteran, Tom Moore, has raised more than 8 million pounds ($10.03 million) for Britain’s health service with a walk around his garden.

SOLUTION: UK virus outbreak 'probably' peaking, but too soon to ease lockdown.

PROBLEM: In a surprising discovery, a research team led by Oregon Health and & Science University reported Wednesday that embryos can help fix themselves if scientists jump-start the process early enough. It’s laboratory research only, nowhere near ready to be tried in a pregnancy. But it suggests that scientists might alter DNA in a way that protects not just one baby from a disease that runs in the family, but his or her offspring as well. And that raises ethical questions. “I for one believe, and this paper supports the view, that ultimately gene editing of human embryos can be made safe. Then the question truly becomes, if we can do it, should we do it?” said Dr. George Daley, a stem cell scientist and dean of Harvard Medical School. He wasn’t involved in the new research and praised it as “quite remarkable.” “This is definitely a leap forward,” agreed developmental geneticist Robin Lovell-Badge of Britain’s Francis Crick Institute. Today, couples seeking to avoid passing on a bad gene sometimes have embryos created in fertility clinics so they can discard those that inherit the disease and attempt pregnancy only with healthy ones, if there are any. Gene editing in theory could rescue diseased embryos. But so-called “germline” changes — altering sperm, eggs or embryos — are controversial because they would be permanent, passed down to future generations. Critics worry about attempts at “designer babies” instead of just preventing disease, and a few previous attempts at learning to edit embryos, in China, didn’t work well and, more importantly, raised safety concerns. In a series of laboratory experiments reported in the journal Nature, the Oregon researchers tried a different approach. They targeted a gene mutation that causes a heart-weakening disease, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, that affects about 1 in 500 people. Inheriting just one copy of the bad gene can cause it. The team programmed a gene-editing tool, named CRISPR-Cas9, that acts like a pair of molecular scissors to find that mutation — a missing piece of genetic material. Then came the test. Researchers injected sperm from a patient with the heart condition along with those molecular scissors into healthy donated eggs at the same time. The scissors cut the defective DNA in the sperm. Normally cells will repair a CRISPR-induced cut in DNA by essentially gluing the ends back together. Or scientists can try delivering the missing DNA in a repair package, like a computer’s cut-and-paste program. Instead, the newly forming embryos made their own perfect fix without that outside help, reported Oregon Health & Science University senior researcher Shoukhrat Mitalipov. We all inherit two copies of each gene, one from dad and one from mom — and those embryos just copied the healthy one from the donated egg. “The embryos are really looking for the blueprint,” Mitalipov, who directs OHSU’s Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy, said in an interview. “We’re finding embryos will repair themselves if you have another healthy copy.” It worked 72 percent of the time, in 42 out of 58 embryos. Normally a sick parent has a 50-50 chance of passing on the mutation. Previous embryo-editing attempts in China found not every cell was repaired, a safety concern called mosaicism. Beginning the process before fertilization avoided that problem: Until now, “everybody was injecting too late,” Mitalipov said. Nor did intense testing uncover any “off-target” errors, cuts to DNA in the wrong places, reported the team, which also included researchers from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California and South Korea’s Institute for Basic Science. The embryos weren’t allowed to develop beyond eight cells, a standard for laboratory research. The experiments were privately funded; U.S. tax dollars aren’t allowed for embryo research. Genetics and ethics experts not involved in the work say it’s a critical first step — but just one step — toward eventually testing the process in pregnancy, something currently prohibited by U.S. policy. “This is very elegant lab work,” but it’s moving so fast that society needs to catch up and debate how far it should go, said Johns Hopkins University bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn. And lots more research is needed to tell if it’s really safe, added Britain’s Lovell-Badge. He and Kahn were part of a National Academy of Sciences report earlier this year that said if germline editing ever were allowed, it should be only for serious diseases with no good alternatives and done with strict oversight. “What we do not want is for rogue clinicians to start offering treatments” that are unproven, as has happened with some other experimental technologies, he stressed. Among key questions: Would the technique work if mom, not dad, harbored the mutation? Is repair even possible if both parents pass on a bad gene? Mitalipov is “pushing a frontier,” but it’s responsible basic research that’s critical for understanding embryos and disease inheritance, noted University of Pittsburgh professor Kyle Orwig. In fact, Mitalipov said the research should offer critics some reassurance: If embryos prefer self-repair, it would be extremely hard to add traits for “designer babies” rather than just eliminate disease. “All we did is un-modify the already mutated gene.” ___ This Associated Press series was produced in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

SOLUTION:
First embryo gene-repair holds promise for inherited disease.