Best selling author Michael Crichton warned in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal (no link available) that people’s cells and body substances are no longer necessarily their own, once removed from the body. Scientists can use your cells and blood to conduct research upon, and if they are . . . . Continue Reading »
Facts don’t matter any more, only narratives. And now this deconstruction of reality is infecting biology and medicine. I have previously described here and in my other writing about how the term human embryo has been redefined from a scientific understanding, meaning the human organism from . . . . Continue Reading »
Which of the following hypotheticals do you believe is most likely to happen in 2007?President Bush’s ESCR funding policy will be overturned.California and/or Washington State will legalize assisted suicide.Adult stem cell therapies will restore mobility to paralyzed people.The Netherlands . . . . Continue Reading »
“Cloning research ‘clearly upsets the general public’ yet it has limited potential for treating disease and adds little to scientific understanding of human biology, according to Professor Austin Smith of the University of Cambridge...’Its prominence is out of proportion to . . . . Continue Reading »
A report out of the UK envisions robots someday having rights. From the Financial Times: “‘If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should,’ said Henrik Christensen, director of the Centre of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia . . . . Continue Reading »
Now that Amendment 2 has passed—which did not include public funding because that would have made it harder to win—we now get to the whipsawing. Business leaders are urging Missouri lawmakers to get with it and improve the atmosphere for Big Biotech. If MO doesn’t, they warn, why . . . . Continue Reading »
The bias in the reportage about human cloning and stem cells has been complained about so frequently to KC Star reporters and editors that there is no question they know precisely what they are doing when they publish scientifically inaccurate reports such as the this one, byline Kit Wager. The . . . . Continue Reading »
One of my pet peeves about Oregon is that it rations health care to the poor in its Medicaid program. I believe that rationing is merely a polite term for discriminating against the people who need health care the most. Be that as it may, the way the program works is that a list of more than 700 . . . . Continue Reading »
Maureen Condic is a sterling scientist at the University of Utah, who advocates on behalf of ethical approaches to biotechnology. She bases her points in evidence and science, and in this piece in the current First Things, demolishes most of the perceived wisdom about the benefits of ESCR. It is a . . . . Continue Reading »
Former KKK leader David Duke published a cover story in Sunday’s NYT Magazine, in which he suggested that the hyper rich have a moral duty to alleviate the worst poverty in the world by giving away up to one-third of their fortunes. Despite Duke’s motive of seeking to alleviate poverty, . . . . Continue Reading »
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