Wesley J. Smith

Readers of SHS may recall several months ago I posted on a thwarted dehydration in which doctors and a seriously injured wife had agreed to dehydrate Jesse Ramirez to death because doctors believed he would never gain consciousness. Thank goodness, Ramirez’s parents fought the . . . . Continue Reading »

Thousand-Hand Bodhisattva MasterpieceThis troop of Chinese dancers is made up of deaf artists. It is quite exquisite. Check it . . . . Continue Reading »

The Not Dead Yet blog has a post up, byline Stephen Drake, castigating an opinion column published in the Hasting Center Report, byline bioethics consultant Anita J. Tarzian (no link available), that validates all of the worries the disability rights community has about the bioethics movement. The . . . . Continue Reading »

Cold Spring Harbor, the very name should bring chills. It was the home of the notorious Eugenics Record Office, operated for decades in the early 20th Century by the world’s most influential eugenicist Charles Davenport—one of the great villains in American history—through whose . . . . Continue Reading »

I’ve known this was coming for a long time—a lawsuit in Montana demanding a state constitutional right to assisted suicide. In fact, I predicted it back in 2000 when I wrote in the Weekly Standard:James H. Armstrong, M.D. v. The State of Montana should have been merely a skirmish in the . . . . Continue Reading »

PETA has filed a complaint against a research lab with the USDA. Par for the course. Often (but not always) such complaints are found to be baseless.But this entry is not about the complaint, rather the reporting about it that tells only half the story. This AP article, byline Judith Kohler, permits . . . . Continue Reading »

Since the KC Star’s Kit Wagar continues refusing to report the stem cell debate accurately or objectively, I thought a few further examples of true scientific definitions are in order—definitions propounded by SCNT supporters, but which Wagar appears to care less about in his . . . . Continue Reading »

Adult stem cell research just keeps rolling along. Now, scientists have morphed fat stem cells into nerve cells. From the story:Accident victims could one day have their severed nerves “rewired” with the help of stem cells extracted by liposuction. University of Manchester researchers . . . . Continue Reading »

This is how the term “somatic cell nuclear transfer” is defined on the National Institutes of Health Web site:Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT—A technique that combines an enucleated egg (nucleus removed) and the nucleus of a somatic cell to make an embryo. SCNT is the . . . . Continue Reading »

Nobel Laureate James Watson is an out-and-out eugenicist who has urged that genetic engineering be used, for example, to rid the world of stupid people, and said that “some anti-Semitism is justified.” None of his eugenicist comments put him in bad odor with the science crowd, but now he . . . . Continue Reading »