Wesley J. Smith

Oops. Here we have been told that PGD, that is, removing one cell from an early embryo and testing to determine whether it is deemed worthy of implantation, does not harm embryos. Not so, perhaps. According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine:Preimplantation genetic screening . . . . Continue Reading »

This just in from Science (no link available):The fact that there is only a about a 1% difference between the genetic make-up of chimpanzees and human has been called “the most overly exposed factoid in modern science”. First established in a paper in 1975, it was confirmed a couple of . . . . Continue Reading »

Patents. You don’t hear too much about the issue in the ESCR debate, but patent some-would-say obstructionism, at least as much as those purportedly caused by President Bush’s funding policy, have allegedly impeded ESCR.Now, it appears that the iron grip of the Wisconsin Alumni Research . . . . Continue Reading »

When it is politically expedient to pretend that it isn’t yet human life:There is long discussion happening at a previous post (click here to check it out), that has evolved into a discussion, among other matters, of whether a one-week old human embryo, often called a blastocyst, is really an . . . . Continue Reading »

Humans are now being denigrated as “greedy” for taking the “lion’s share” of solar energy by converting more than our fair share of plant life to our own use. From the story:HUMANS are just one of the millions of species on Earth, but we use up almost a quarter of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Patrick Bell, a graduate student at Seattle University and a valued staffer at the dreaded Discovery Institute, won third prize in the MPA/MPP You Tube “Change the World in One Minute” Public Policy Challenge. You see, the DI and people associated with it, care a great deal about . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the things that is most interesting about producing Secondhand Smoke is seeing which posts generate the most comments. Today, I posted an entry about the television program The 4400, that I thought would generate considerable interest. (I don’t measure the interest of people in any post . . . . Continue Reading »

A dearth in human eggs and the potential harm to women’s health sometimes caused in obtaining them through current means, has both stymied human cloning research and moved biotechnology toward exploiting poor women for their eggs in their zeal to conduct human cloning research.This important . . . . Continue Reading »

The USA Network has a great science fiction series called The 4400, which could just as easily be named Transhumanism TV. The plot is about “the 4400,” people who were abducted by aliens or future human time travelers, and who are “returned” possessed of super-human . . . . Continue Reading »

The KC Star is, in my view, the most biased newspaper in the country in its reporting on the ESCR/human cloning controversy. For example, when the political decision was made by promoters of human cloning research in MO to rename embryonic stem cells “early” stem cells, the paper made . . . . Continue Reading »