Human Exceptionalism

Demagoguery comes easy to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The most recent example comes out of Australia, where PETA is mounting an international boycott against that nation’s wool industry over the admittedly unpleasant — but necessary — Australian sheep-ranching practice known as “mulesing” (described below). Yet the defensive response of the Australian wool industry after being Read More ›

BIOTECHNOLOGY is becoming dangerously close to raging out of control. Scientists are engaging in ever increasingly macabre experiments that threaten to mutate nature and the human condition at the molecular level. Worse, many scientists have made it clear that society has no right to apply the brakes. According to this view, scientists have a constitutional right under the First Amendment Read More ›

James Hughes may be a bioethicist and a professor of health policy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, but his real calling is as an evangelist for the nascent materialist quasi-religion of transhumanism. In this sense, Hughes’ first book, Citizen Cyborg, is not merely a polemic; it is an epistle urging transhumanists to remain true to the tenets of their Read More ›

IT NEVER FAILS. If an embryonic stem cell researcher issues a press release touting a purported research advance, the media trip over each other to give the story full dramatic fanfare. But if an even better adult or umbilical cord blood stem cell advance comes to light—even when the experiments involve humans—you can usually hear the crickets chirping.  The latest examples Read More ›

THE PASSAGE OF PROPOSITION 71 in California (the Stem Cell Research and Cures Act) was an acute case of electoral folly. As Californians plunged headlong into a $6 billion quagmire of debt in a quixotic quest for “miracle cures” from human cloning and embryonic stem cells, they simultaneously rejected Prop. 67, an initiative that would have added a modest tax Read More ›

The international euthanasia movement’s first principle is radical individualism. The idea is that we each own our own body and hence should be able to do what we choose with our physical self—including destroy it. Not only that, but if we want to die, liberty dictates that we should have ready access to a “good death,” a demise that is Read More ›

EVER SINCE President Bush limited federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research to existing cell lines, the mainstream media has obsessed about the perpetual political campaign to overturn his policy. But this is a mere dustup, a tempest in a teapot compared to the far more consequential story begging to be told of the radical and ambitious political agenda being pursued Read More ›

SEATTLE, NOV. 8 – Welcome to brave new biotech world where according to Discovery Institute senior fellow and acclaimed bioethicist Wesley J. Smith the question is “whether science will continue to serve society, or instead dominate it.” Cloning researchers claim to have cloned an embryo that is mostly human, but also part animal. Biotech companies brag about manufacturing human embryos Read More ›

As I travel the country speaking about the many ongoing controversies in bioethics, I am occasionally approached by grieving people who believe that a catastrophically injured relative who had been declared “brain dead” did not die from injuries but was actually killed during organ procurement. I always assure these emotionally devastated folks that as far as I have been able Read More ›

CALIFORNIA IS FLAT BROKE, its budget a fiscal train wreck. Expenses have so far exceeded state revenues that this spring citizens of the Golden State were forced to pass a bond measure borrowing $15 billion (not including interest) just to keep the state afloat. And now, the Piper must be paid to restore fiscal stability.The budget crisis is causing a Read More ›