Human Exceptionalism

Tuesday’s 6-3 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court preventing the federal government from punishing doctors who prescribe federally controlled substances — narcotics — for suicide is being spun by euthanasia advocates as a big boost for their cause. Never mind that the ruling was very narrow and did not, as proponents claim, “uphold” Oregon’s law. And never mind that Justice Read More ›

The news about Monday’s 6-3 assisted suicide ruling is not as bad as euthanasia opponents might have feared. Indeed, even in the midst of disappointment that Oregon carried the day, there is some moderately good news: Gonzales v. Oregon was not an exercise in judicial activism. The Supreme Court did not issue a sweeping endorsement of physician-assisted suicide. Nor, did Read More ›

This article, published by Time, quotes Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley Smith: But Wesley J. Smith, a Discovery Institute fellow was skeptical: “People are not exactly marching in the streets demanding the right to receive lethal prescriptions,” he said. The rest of the article can be found here.

Between March 2004 and the end of 2005, South Korean veterinarian Woo-Suk Hwang rose from relative obscurity to become the world’s most famous scientist. His rise to international renown began when he reported, in the March 12, 2004, edition of the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science, to have created the first cloned human embryos and embryonic-stem-cell line. Hwang’s reputation really hit the stratosphere Read More ›

IAN WILMUT, the creator of Dolly the sheep and newly appointed director of Edinburgh University’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine, wants to experiment on dying people with embryonic stem cells—even though he admits that such potential treatments “have not been properly tested.” Wilmut’s plan, which in essence would use people with terminal neurological conditions as lab rats, is the latest example Read More ›

In February 2004, Woo—Suk Hwang made world headlines when he claimed to have cloned human embryos using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, and then to have derived a line of stem cells from the embryos that could be used for medical research. Enthusiasm for this first “successful” experiment in human cloning, published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science, Read More ›

This article, published by the Los Angeles Daily News, quotes Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith: But whether its research will ever yield the sorts of miraculous cures that Proposition 71 backers promised is highly doubtful. Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, sees CIRM as “a state unto itself” and “a political institute, not a Read More ›

According to recent showbiz news, jailed murderer Jack Kevorkian may soon be the subject of a laudatory movie biopic. (No, it is not intended as a horror movie.) Unfortunately, this seems to be a serious project. The announced director is Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple. The screenwriter is Barbara Turner (Pollock). Stars touted as potentially playing the lead include Read More ›

FOUR MILLION BABIES ARE BORN in this country every year, bearing gifts of inestimable value. Foremost among these, of course, is the love they bring into the world and elicit from it. More practically, however, these infants bring with them something that we are learning has great potential to alleviate human suffering: the stem cells contained in the blood of Read More ›

MUCH OF THE CURRENT DEBATE over what is generally known as therapeutic cloning—that is, somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) cloning conducted for research purposes rather than reproduction—centers on the nature of the thing that is created by the cloning process. Until recently, this issue wasn’t controversial: Cloning, it was widely agreed, created a new human embryo. Thus, in 1997, President Read More ›