Human Exceptionalism

“PEOPLE NEED A FAIRY TALE,” Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, told Washington Post reporter Rick Weiss, explaining why scientists have allowed society to believe wrongly that stem cells are likely to effectively treat Alzheimer’s disease. “Maybe that’s unfair, but they need a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.” Read More ›

Opponents of human cloning and federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research are being fast marginalized by a myth that cloning will be an immediate panacea to the ravages of degenerative disease and disabling injury. The intensity of belief in science as savior, combined with a desperate desire that it be so, has become so fervent that faith in this research has Read More ›

SEATTLE, MAY 22 — Discovery Institute senior fellow Wesley J. Smith today was named by the National Journal as one of the top ten expert thinkers in bioengineering in the nation, because of his work on bioethics. According to the May 22 “Issues and Answers” issue of National Journal: “Experts are the people the politicians will call on when they Read More ›

WHAT LITTLE Terri Schiavo has left in this life, is being cruelly stripped away. Not only has a judge ordered her to die slowly by dehydration via having her tube-supplied food and water removed, but now, her (estranged) husband and legal guardian Michael Schiavo has completely isolated her from her family. Ever since mysterious “puncture wounds” were supposedly detected on Read More ›

News that a South Korean researcher created 30 cloned human embryos has stoked the hype machine once again. Perhaps a decade from now, the story line goes, tissues taken from human clones made from patients with serious illnesses can be used in miracle treatments for such diseases as Alzheimer’s, diabetes or Parkinson’s. More likely a pipe dream. Many scientists now Read More ›

A little noticed litigation in the United Kingdom could be a harbinger of medical woes to come here in the United States. Leslie Burke, age 44, is suing for the right to stay alive. Yes, you read right: Burke, who has a terminal neurological disease, is deathly afraid that doctors will refuse to provide him wanted food and water when Read More ›

BioEvolutionHow Biotechnology Is Changing Our Worldby Michael FumentoEncounter, 486 pp., $28.95 WHAT WE HAVE NEEDED for a long time is a biotechnology advocate to write a book promoting the virtues of the emerging science, without falling into the trap of demonizing biotech-critics and skeptics as so many latter day Luddites who would return us to the bad old days of Read More ›

The anti-human values that permeate the animal-rights/liberation movement are, once again, vividly on public display. Cambridge University, under pressure from animal liberationists, recently announced it has dropped a proposed multimillion-pound research project that would have, in part, conducted experiments on monkeys in the urgent search for the causes of and cures for devastating neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Read More ›

The “Rule OF Terri’s Case” has struck again. The term was coined by Pat Anderson, attorney for Terri Schiavo’s parents Bob and Mary Schindler, who complained: “If following a legal procedure will likely result in Terri dying, it will be adhered to. But if a procedure could make that outcome more difficult to attain, it will not be followed.” Anderson’s Read More ›

Consumer’s Guide to aBrave New World,by Wesley J. Smith(Encounter, 219 pp., $25.95) Leo Strauss found it telling that Machiavelli mentioned only one other figure who served as the teacher of princes, the office that Machiavelli was claiming for himself. And that was Chiron the centaur, who was aptly constituted to be a tutor of princes because he was half man, Read More ›