Center on Human Exceptionalism
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 ›
Consumers 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 ›
CLONING ADVOCATES are playing a shell game with the American people. At the federal level, they advocate the legalization of human cloning but assert that cloned embryos should be destroyed after 14 days of development and never implanted in wombs (the Hatch / Feinstein Bill). But this is a diversionary political tactic. Hatch / Feinstein’s true purpose is to prevent Read More ›
Ever since embryonic stem cells were first extracted from human embryos in 1998, biotechnologists, abetted by a compliant media, have promised they would soon lead to miraculous medical cures for degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. First, we were told, all that would be needed were stem cell lines extracted from “surplus” embryos “left over” from in vitro fertilization Read More ›
MEDIA BIAS is alive and well and busily promoting the brave new world. I personally experienced the phenomenon recently when I participated in an educational symposium in Frankfort, Kentucky (along with Drs. David Prentice and John Hubert). Our purpose was to provide empirical and moral support for pending state legislation that would outlaw human cloning in Kentucky. (Similar laws have Read More ›
MANY WHO SUPPORT Terri Schiavo’s threatened dehydration assert that removing a feeding tube from a profoundly cognitively disabled person results in a painless and gentle ending. But is this really true? After all, it would be agonizing if you or I were locked in a room for two weeks and deprived of all food and water. So, why should we Read More ›
One evening, during the second term of President Ronald Reagan, Terri Schiavo and her husband Michael decided to watch a television movie about Karen Ann Quinlan. Quinlan, as most readers know, had a tragic life. After overdosing on a combination of drugs and alcohol, she fell into unconsciousness and never awakened. Her parents won a lawsuit in the New Jersey Read More ›
WHEN TERRI SCHIAVO collapsed in 1990, causes unknown, she could have had no idea that 13 years later people the world over would know her name and care very much about whether she lived or died. Yet what began as a private tragedy—a vivacious young woman stricken in the very prime of her life with a brain injury that left Read More ›