Wesley J. Smith

This gets so old: In Missouri there is a pending fight over an initiative to legalize human therapeutic cloning. The Missouri Secretary of State has been sued for permitting the signature petitions to be released. The basis of the suit is that the petitions claim that the initiative bans . . . . Continue Reading »

Phillip Nitschke, the “Down Under” Kevorkian is moving to New Zealand because Australia has wisely outlawed some of his suicide promoting activities. For those who don’t know of him, Nitschke was paid by the Hemlock Society (now merged into Compassion and Choices)to develop the . . . . Continue Reading »

A few years ago, animal rights/liberation activists successfully convinced Florida voters to grant pregnant pigs the state constitutional right to have enough space within which to turn around. Now, that may be a perfectly fine and humane animal husbandry policy. But, pigs do not belong in human . . . . Continue Reading »

This bit of good news escaped me until this weekend: Arizona has passed two laws that impact the debates over human cloning and embryonic stem cells. The first, 35-196.04, prohibits the use of any public monies for human cloning. And, unlike phony bans so often seen at the state and federal level, . . . . Continue Reading »

I am often involved in public controversies reported about in the New York Times. In my more than ten years of such work, the repeated examples of biased reporting in that newspaper are almost beyond recounting. What drives me the most nuts is not so much the sneering or condescending tone the . . . . Continue Reading »

Woo-Suk-Hwang, the world’s first human cloner, has resigned all public posts because he paid for the human eggs used in cloning research and then mislead the journal Nature about it. (He will continue his research.) This may well doom the international cloned embryonic stem cell bank that . . . . Continue Reading »

Thanks to everyone who tunes into Secondhand Smoke. Have a wonderful . . . . Continue Reading »

This thoughtful commentary, published in the Brussels Journal, worries that Europeans, which have a form of health care rationing already in place to keep public health programs afloat, may turn to euthanasia as a form of controlling costs. Here is the key quote:“In Europe there are medical . . . . Continue Reading »

I have reported here about how one paralyzed woman in South Korea gained some feeling and mobility using umbilical cord blood stem cells. One patient, of course, does not an efficacious treatment make. But this study adds substantially to the belief that UC stem cells are going to do marvelous . . . . Continue Reading »

Bioethicists Art Caplan and Glenn McGee push for full federal funding of human cloning research in this opinion column. As is usual for articles such as this, the bioethicists claim, “A clear majority of Americans favor embryonic stem cell research. Yet there are no meaningful federal funds . . . . Continue Reading »