Wesley J. Smith

Pamela Winnick sent me the following e-mail with permission to post here. You may recall, that she worried that “death doctors” were seeking to force the family to “pull the plug” on her seriously ill father.“Wes, a mere week after the death-loving doctors tried to get . . . . Continue Reading »

This non-story front page story in the San Francisco Chronicle proves many of the points I have been making about our roiling biotech controversies for the last several years:1. The headline, “Backers to Push Stem Cell Issue Across Country,” as if this is news, is laughable. Big Biotech . . . . Continue Reading »

I deeply admire Leon Kass. At a personal level, he is a true gentleman. I consider him to be one of our deepest thinkers. I have always thought that he has been unfairly pigeon-holed by lesser intellects in bioethics and this interview proves my point. I advise reading it in full, but for the . . . . Continue Reading »

Spain continues to debate giving “human” rights to great apes. According to the story in the Telegraph, “The law would eliminate the concept of ‘ownership’ for great apes, instead placing them under the ‘moral guardianship’ of the state, much as is the case . . . . Continue Reading »

Ah, the slippery slope: It just keeps slip-sliding away.The latest example comes (again) from the UK, where “one of the country’s leading ethicists” has called for the killing of patients who have not asked to be euthanized. As reported by the Guardian: “Len Doyal, emeritus . . . . Continue Reading »

Ben Stein, who I met at a dinner and spoke with about the problems emerging in bioethics, contacted me later to share the terrible experience his family had while his father, the economist Herb Stein, was dying. “They treated him like inventory,” Stein wrote me in a turn of phrase I will . . . . Continue Reading »

Harvard University and Children’s Hospital Boston are collaborating together to begin experiments in human cloning (somatic cell nuclear transfer). Their purpose is to try and obtain patient specific embryonic stem cells—a feat claimed to have been done by Woo-suk Hwang in South Korea, . . . . Continue Reading »

A research team from Columbia University has identified criteria for determining whether an embryo has died. I was aware this work was being pursued. When I was presenting at a stem cell symposium in Rome last year, Drs. Donald Landry and Howard Zucker discussed this issue, and I was impressed with . . . . Continue Reading »

As promised, here is Will Saletan’s slant on the Stanford transhumanist conference. My article is written too, although I don’t yet know when it will appear. This is my favorite paragraph from Saletan’s recounting, which pretty well nails the scene:“Remember those kids who . . . . Continue Reading »

The man who led the team that cloned Dolly the sheep—he didn’t do the actual cloning—has come out in favor of reproductive cloning for therapeutic purposes. That is, he would like to use cloning and genetic engineering to eradicate serious inherited disease. Wilmut has always been . . . . Continue Reading »