By Sharon Begley and Caroline Humer

(Reuters) – In a boost for President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform law, two states in the Northwest said on Friday that insurance companies submitted applications to sell policies on the states’ health insurance exchanges at rates well below what some insurance executives had predicted.

The insurance marketplaces are a key element of the reform law, which is due to take full effect in 2014. A core principle of these exchanges is that competition, along with government subsidies and other measures, will keep rates affordable.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The long-awaited, controversial new edition of the bible of psychiatry can be characterized by many numbers: its 947 pages, its $199 price tag, its more than 300 maladies (from “dependent personality disorder” and “voyeuristic disorder” to “delayed ejaculation,” “kleptomania” and “intermittent explosive disorder”), each limning the potential woes of being human.

But to the psychiatrist who shepherded the tortuous creation of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” perhaps the single most important number is the “5″ in its title: This is the DSM-5, not the DSM-V.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Scientists’ assertion that the advance in therapeutic cloning announced on Wednesday could not and would not pave the way to cloning a baby did little to assuage critics of the research.

The research “will lead inexorably to cloning to produce a live born child,” said bioethicist O. Carter Snead, professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic University in Indiana.