“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 ›
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 ›
IT IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY clear that the bio-anarchists leading the charge to Brave New World want a virtually unlimited license to engage in human cloning. The proof is in the legislation they keep trying to pass. It is bad enough that in Washington, senators Orin Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, have introduced the Human Cloning Read More ›
When President Bush selected bioethicist and author Leon R. Kass to head the President’s Council on Bioethics, many were outraged. Kass, a critic of human cloning, was accused of being a Luddite who would use his position to stack the council deck against “scientific progress.” But that is not how Kass viewed his mandate. He envisioned that the council would Read More ›
STEM CELLS are undifferentiated “master cells” in the body that can develop into differentiated tissues, such as bone, muscle, nerve, or skin. Stem cell research may lead to exponential improvements in the treatment of many terminal and debilitating conditions, from cancer to Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s to diabetes to heart disease. Indeed, break-throughs in stem cell research reported just in the Read More ›