Wesley J. Smith

Gerald Schatten, the University of Pittsburgh researcher who started Woo-suk Hwang’s downfall by accusing him of buying women’s eggs and lying about it, is now being accused in turn by Korean media of trying to steal Hwang’s cloning technique by patenting it here in the United . . . . Continue Reading »

This Los Angeles Times Story about Woo-suk Hwang promising a 12-year old paralyzed boy that he would walk again even though he knew his research was fraudulent, tells us all we need to know about the world’s most infamous scientist. What a creep.This was a good story worth recounting. But it . . . . Continue Reading »

The Pew Poll, which I reported on below, also finds huge majorities favoring the so-called “right to die.” This is an ambiguous term, often used by assisted suicide advocates to identify their cause. But this section of the poll is not referring to euthanasia or assisted suicide. Rather, . . . . Continue Reading »

Almost every time I am interviewed about the legalization of assisted suicide, reporters bring up the point that majorities supposedly support legalizing doctors providing people with the means to kill themselves. My response to such questions is that it depends on the poll. Some polls show that . . . . Continue Reading »

This is a riot. When the charlatan Hwang was thought to have successfully cloned human embryos and derived patient-specific stem cells, it was lauded universally in the science community as a big and important step forward for regenerative medicine. Now, that it is clear Hwang was lying, the science . . . . Continue Reading »

This discovery could lead to important insights into breast cancer, and eventually, the ability to regrow breasts after mastectomy. We live in an amazing . . . . Continue Reading »

I have been waiting with some anticipation Will Saletan’s take on the Hwang scandal. Even though I disagree with Saletan often, I find him to be one of the most provocative and interesting writers covering the science and ethics beats. Good for Slate for giving him seemingly free rein. Saletan . . . . Continue Reading »

Bradford Short is a friend of mine, a young man with a big brain and a passion for bioethics and defending the sanctity/equality of human life. In this NRO piece, he takes the pro euthanasia bioethicist Margaret Pabst Battin to task today for “murdering history.” I haven’t read her . . . . Continue Reading »

USA Today is reporting that the South Korean Government may have known Hwang’s science was fraudulent but boosted it anyway. Here’s another aspect of the cloning controversy in a nutshell; the stampede effect to get government boosting this research with bountiful grants of the . . . . Continue Reading »

The more I read about the Hwang debacle, the more I see the cloning enterprise in a nutshell. Not the fraud part. But the dehumanization. One of the principle objections feminists make to human cloning is the great potential that women will be exploited for their eggs, which would be worse in . . . . Continue Reading »