December 21, 2006
An Indian court has granted damages to the owner of an elephant killed in an auto accident because the pachyderm was “on par” with a human because it could obey commands and do tricks, etc. Well, then the owner had … Read More
December 21, 2006
Brave New Britain is at it again. Cloning researchers have been given the right to ask women to donate eggs for use in biotechnological experiments. Before now, egg procurement for research had to be done in association with fertility or … Read More
December 21, 2006
Robert Schindler, Terri Schiavo’s father, has had a stroke and is in a hospital intensive care unit. He is conscious. At present, the doctors are trying to stabilize his condition. Once that is done, he will be transferred to a … Read More
December 21, 2006
A terminally ill Italian man who lost a legal battle for the right to die has passed away after his doctor said he switched off his life support machine. (BBC)
December 21, 2006
After watching her husband and two daughters die painfully from cancer, Madeline Neumann decided she did not want to prolong her own death. When she moved into a nursing home in Florida at age 89, she signed an advance directive … Read More
December 21, 2006
Even before Adolf Hitler and his Nazis launched their genocidal campaign across Europe, doctors became white-coated killers and nurses served as accomplices in the murder of about 200,000 German children and adults, all in the name of creating a superior … Read More
December 21, 2006
Governor aims to cover California’s uninsured millions, raising issue’s profile nationally. (Wall Street Journal — Free Link)
December 21, 2006
ONE of the tests of a liberal society is whether the state stays out of the bedroom—but more than 3m people alive now were not made in bedrooms. They came into being as a result of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) … Read More
December 21, 2006
The UK’s fertility regulator has amended a licence to allow stem cell researchers to recruit egg donors not already having medical treatment. (BBC)
December 21, 2006
Sperm stocks in Canada are significantly down since the federal government made it illegal to pay men for the donations, and the supply of sperm imported from the U.S. will eventually be cut off, Health Canada says. (CBC News)
December 21, 2006
The well-advertised conflict between progressive science and backward ethics has had the important effect of distracting attention from the feebleness and sometimes the actual deceptiveness of the scientific claims made on behalf of embryonic stem cells. (American Spectator)
December 20, 2006
Best selling author Michael Crichton warned in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal (no link available) that people’s cells and body substances are no longer necessarily their own, once removed from the body. Scientists can use your cells and blood to … Read More
December 20, 2006
Facts don’t matter any more, only narratives. And now this deconstruction of reality is infecting biology and medicine. I have previously described here and in my other writing about how the term human embryo has been redefined from a scientific … Read More
December 20, 2006
Brief sessions of brain exercise can have long-lasting benefits for elderly people, helping them stay mentally fit for at least five years, one of the most rigorous tests of the “use-it-or-lose-it” theory suggests. (AP)
December 19, 2006
Cloning research ‘clearly upsets the general public’ yet it has limited potential for treating disease and adds little to scientific understanding of human biology, according to Professor Austin Smith of the University of Cambridge . . . ‘Its prominence is … Read More
December 19, 2006
A report out of the UK envisions robots someday having rights. From the Financial Times: If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should,’ said Henrik Christensen, director of the Centre of Robotics and … Read More
December 19, 2006
Slate has posted William Saletan’s The Best “Human Nature” Stories of 2006. If you’ve never read his Human Nature column, you owe it to yourself to check out his best of list. And if you’re a regular Human Nature reader, … Read More
December 19, 2006
Now that Amendment 2 has passed–which did not include public funding because that would have made it harder to win–we now get to the whipsawing. Business leaders are urging Missouri lawmakers to get with it and improve the atmosphere for … Read More
December 19, 2006
The bias in the reportage about human cloning and stem cells has been complained about so frequently to KC Star reporters and editors that there is no question they know precisely what they are doing when they publish scientifically inaccurate … Read More
December 19, 2006
One of my pet peeves about Oregon is that it rations health care to the poor in its Medicaid program. I believe that rationing is merely a polite term for discriminating against the people who need health care the most. … Read More
December 19, 2006
The medical promise of therapeutic cloning has been oversold and its unreasonably high profile risks turning the public against more promising aspects of stem-cell research, according to one of Britain’s most respected experts in the field. Cloning research “clearly upsets … Read More
December 19, 2006
This fall, affluent Californians gave $31 million to the state agency that doles out grants for stem cell research, allowing it to begin functioning. Private money is also building new stem cell labs on university campuses across the state. (Washington … Read More
December 19, 2006
Research on embryonic stem cells continues to ignite national debate over the beginning of human life. And with the Legislature likely to take up the issue in its next session, many worry that inaccurate information is being perpetuated by stem … Read More
December 19, 2006
The Government Accountability Office has released a scathing report on the way the Food and Drug Administration handles direct-to-consumer prescription-drug advertising, saying the agency has issued fewer warning letters to pharmaceutical companies for false and misleading advertisements and is taking … Read More
December 19, 2006
Back at the beginning of 2002, there was considerable optimism regarding the promise that embryonic stem cells were said to hold for millions of people suffering from fatal or debilitating medical conditions. Stem cells derived from human embryos, it was … Read More
