Wesley J. Smith

Danger Zone

In the court (and courts) of life and death, a little 11-year-old Massachusetts girl named Haleigh Poutre could be the next Terri Schiavo. For those who have not heard the tragic story, Haleigh was beaten nearly to death last September, allegedly by her adoptive mother and stepfather. The beating left her unconscious and barely clinging to life. Within a week or so Read More ›

Wooed

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 ›

Umbilical Accord

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 ›

Resisting A Culture of Death

This article, published by The New York Sun, mentions Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley Smith: How I wish the award ceremony had been televised on C-Span or elsewhere so that the nation could have heard the warning hurled by the man who introduced Mr. Hentoff, Wesley Smith. Mr. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in California who Read More ›

Wall Street Goes Wobbly

The fury of radical animal liberationists is growing, leading them to acts of brazen lawlessness and flagrant vigilantism. In the United Kingdom, a farm family that raised guinea pigs for medical testing was subjected to years of personal threats and property vandalism by animal liberationists. The family had courageously refused to be intimidated, but when the liberationists robbed the grave Read More ›

A Kass Act

Leon Kass has stepped down as chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics. On one level, I am happy for Kass. For four years he has broiled in the pressure cooker of Washington politics, subjected to vituperation and vicious calumny from the bioethics and science establishments for his heterodox (to them) defense of the intrinsic dignity and importance of human Read More ›

Have You Heard the Good News…

We have heard it stated so often it has become a media mantra: Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) offer the greatest hope for cures; adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells have far less potential; the Bush administration’s embryonic stem cell funding restrictions have caused America to fall behind in the great international race to develop effective ESC treatments. Baloney, baloney, Read More ›

Is Assisted Suicide Legal?

Click here to read Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith and Case Western Reserve University Associate Professor Jonathan Adler debate the legality of assisted suicide.