In 2000, The New England Journal of Medicine reported that patients being euthanized in the Netherlands sometimes experienced significant side effects (apart from death, that is), such as nausea, convulsions, or coma. This belied the assertion oft made by euthanasia proponents that being killed by a doctor necessarily provides the euphemistic “gentle landing” of euthanasia lore. #ad#Responding to the Netherlands report, the NEJM published Read More ›
Petitions have only begun to be gathered to qualify the Missouri Stem Cell and Cures Initiative for November’s ballot, and already the controversy is white hot. Proponents contend that their proposal would merely permit embryonic stem cell research using a technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, while also banning human cloning. But opponents insist that the process is human Read More ›
Editor’s Note: The following audio was recorded from a talk given by Wesley Smith at Discovery Institute’s Washington DC office on February 22, 2006. Download Audio MP3 (34.7MB)
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›