Wesley J. Smith

Tom Harkin has objected to unanimous consent that would have allowed the unopposed umbilical cord blood stem cell bill to reach the floor for vote and passage. Shame on him. Not surprisingly, he is one of the most self righteous in beating his breast against President Bush’s embryonic stem . . . . Continue Reading »

The Science paper claiming that Woo-Suk Hwang created cloned embryonic stem cells has been withdrawn! It was all faked. And yet, it was published in Science, one of the most prestigious science journals in the world. This will have huge repercussions. What does it tell us about the peer review . . . . Continue Reading »

The recent announcement that clueless Hollywood will make a biopic lionizing Jack Kevorkian got me looking back into my files about the ghoulish, unemployable pathologist. Even I had forgotten just how surreal that period in history was. In this NRO piece, citing his own words, I describe the . . . . Continue Reading »

Holy Cow! Now, Gerald Schatten, of the University of Pittsburgh, who quit Woo-Suk Hwang’s cloned stem cell banking venture over the egg issue, has cast tremendous doubt on the veracity of Hwang’s claims to have cloned human embryos and derived individualized embryonic stem cell lines . . . . Continue Reading »

Nigel Cameron and M. L. Tina Stevens weigh in subtantively in the San Francisco Chronicle on the ethical problem of exploiting women for their eggs in the human cloning enterprise. Another informative piece worth . . . . Continue Reading »

Richard Doerflinger nails it in this impressive NRO . . . . Continue Reading »

This is a potentially tremendous story: bone marrow stem cells have been discovered in mice that have been changed into many types of body tissues. It won’t matter to the pro cloners who will just shrug their shoulders and keep on cloning. But it will matter to the rest of society. I have long . . . . Continue Reading »

This isn’t a first, but it is a continuing effort. Researchers have used stem cells to create a mouse with human brain cells in its brain. The amount is minute, but it begs an important question that isn’t even close to the public discourse front burner: How much human DNA into an animal . . . . Continue Reading »

The smoke is billowing ever thicker at Woo-Suk Hwang’s cloning lab. There are now charges being made by a subordinate and published in the Korean media that Hwang falsified some of the data he published. His university is now insisting on independent verification. Again, I have no idea if it . . . . Continue Reading »

I received this correspondence from a reader about my piece in the Daily Standard exposing the bias-by-omission of the media when failing to fully and accurately describe what is entailed in therapeutic cloning:“The deliberate confusion in terminology by commercial interests regarding cloning . . . . Continue Reading »