Free Republic

Today the newly emerged worldview of many scientists sets caution aside and moves into immediate use of the new molecular genetic techniques in food. Scientists who question this position are often seen by their peers as heretics.... in 2006, the USA Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved milk and meat from cloned cattle, pigs and goats for the human food chain without labelling; • large biotechnology companies are already engaged in promoting transgenic livestock as a means of improving animals and their products for human consumption (Biotechnology Industry Organization, 2008);... the use of transgenic livestock in practical farming and in...

Four years hasn't been long enough to forget. Some supporters of Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential bid, including Texans, remain bitter over how the last primary turned out, and they want their candidate back on the ballot this year, one way or another. Petitions are being circulated to encourage Clinton to resign as secretary of state and run for president; write-in efforts are under way to put her name at the top of the ballot. Some say they wouldn't mind if President Barack Obama did what has long been whispered: swap the jobs of Clinton and Joe Biden, making Clinton the...

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Sunday compared his war against reproductive rights and gay rights to the Civil Rights Movement, and attacked Newt Gingrich for putting social issues "in the back of the bus." "In terms of social issues [Gingrich] has been married three times, he has two divorces, he's admitted to infidelity," ABC's Christiane Amanpour noted during an interview with Santorum. "Should voters hold that against him?" "I think character is definitely an issue," Santorum opined. "I've been married 21 years, I have seven children. That's a factor that people are going to look at and should look...

Human embryonic stem cells. Credit: Nissim Benvenisty, Courtesy Public Library of Science (CC BY 2.5) Denver, Colo., Oct 8, 2011 / 06:50 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A recent experiment cloning human embryos for potential stem cell use did little to advance a medical breakthrough and violated human life, Catholic experts said in reaction to the news.“The attitudes of the scientists involved,” said Fr. Thomas Berg, head of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person, show a “profound disrespect for the goods inherent to natural procreation and a demeaning of human life.”In an experiment publicized Oct. 5 in the...

A total of 60 Bulgarian citizens have now been arrested by police authorities across Europe for participating in a large international scheme for credit card forgery and other crimes.The gang has been active since nine years and has accumulated a fortune estimated at over EUR 50. Around 5000 police officers from Spain Bulgaria, Italy, Poland, Germany, US intelligence agents and experts from Europol have contributed to the operation, codenamed Night Clone Card.The Bulgarian crime ring, which has been described as the world's largest in the sphere of bank card cloning, has been active mostly in Italy, where nine suspects were...

A genetics research group working in a lab in Kansas, has succeeded in creating a new species of lizard by mating two distinct species of North American Whiptails, both native to New Mexico. The offspring, all females are not only fertile, but can reproduce by laying eggs that don't need to be fertilized, which means, they actually clone themselves. Scientists have known for years that some species exist due to interspecies mating, the whiptail lizards have provided proof of that; they’ve been creating new species themselves for at least several hundred thousand years. What’s new is the process being manipulated...

In 1997, Barack Obama was a "Senior Lecturer" at the University of Chicago Law School. On December 13, 1997, Professor Obama administered a final exam to his law students... The first question: help a married couple clone their only daughter. The scene is set by then-Professor Obama thusly: Mary and Joseph are middle-aged parents. Their daughter, Dolly, was in a horrible car accident, after which she entered a "vegetative state." After discussing the issue, and faced with a "void," her parents have decided to clone her, even though the will that Dolly had left is vague about what she wanted...

A bill attempting to head off possible human cloning is starting its travel through Minnesota’s Legislature. The human cloning ban is a priority of the state’s dominant anti-abortion group, Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life. The legislation would make it a felony to attempt, perform or aid in cloning by combining embryonic eggs with the nucleus removed and other human cells.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Scientists fretted Friday that a spectacular cloning fraud that hid in plain sight has set back legitimate stem cell work around the world. Cloning experts and stem cell scientists said research in the potentially revolutionary field of regenerative medicine will continue unabated. But they said public confidence in their work had been weakened by a sham branded by experts as the most visible case of scientific fraud they could recall. Scientists also struggled to explain how they didn't earlier catch the charismatic South Korean veterinarian's claim in a Science paper published in May that he cloned...

Japanese scientists believe they have the technology and know-how to create a living woolly mammoth, a clone of a species that died thousands of years ago. Finding a fully intact frozen woolly mammoth isn’t enough, it seems. Now, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan is planning to bring the species back from extinction through cloning, reports the AFP. Dr. Akira Iritani plans to insert the nuclei of mammoth cells into a modern elephant’s egg cell, creating a woolly mammoth embryo that will be brought to term by an elephant mother. The elephant was chosen because it is the nearest...

TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese researchers will launch a project this year to resurrect the long-extinct mammoth by using cloning technology to bring the ancient pachyderm back to life in around five years time. The researchers will try to revive the species by obtaining tissue this summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian research laboratory, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported. "Preparations to realise this goal have been made," Akira Iritani, leader of the team and a professor emeritus of Kyoto University, told the mass-circulation daily. Under the plan, the nuclei of mammoth cells will be inserted into an...

Japanese researchers will launch a project this year to resurrect the long-extinct mammoth by using cloning technology to bring the ancient pachyderm back to life in around five years time. The researchers will try to revive the species by obtaining tissue this summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian research laboratory, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported. "Preparations to realise this goal have been made," Akira Iritani, leader of the team and a professor emeritus of Kyoto University, told the mass-circulation daily. Under the plan, the nuclei of mammoth cells will be inserted into an elephant's egg cell...

This week marks the beginning of the end of the long national nightmare known as the 111th Congress.  Republicans were given a second chance—by default—through a national effort to stop the destructive Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda. House Republicans are poised to begin making the same kind of business-as-usual mistakes that relegated the party to minority status in 2006.  The most glaring example is the looming threat of having Rep. Fred Upton (RINO-Mich.) become chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, despite his liberal voting record, simply because he’s next in line.  If there is one thing voters made absolutely clear...

A drill monkey, Mandrillus leucophaeus, at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. Photo: Grendelkhan, Wikimedia Commons Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and San Diego Zoo have collaborated to create stem cells from the skin cells of a dead drill monkey, an endangered monkey native to Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and Cameroon. The scientists, speaking at the International Society for Stem Cell Research in San Francisco, hope that the "induced pluripotent stem" (iPS) cells thus created can then be biochemically persuaded into becoming sperm and egg cells. They can then be implanted into the womb of another...

AUL's Kagan File: The "Human Cloning" MemoMEMORANDUMTO: [Undisclosed Parties]FROM: Americans United for Life Legal TeamDATE: June 9, 2010RE: Elena Kagan File: Advocated Cloning Humans for Research Backgrounder: During the time that Elena Kagan served as a top domestic policy advisor for President Bill Clinton (1997-1999), she played a key role in shaping and executing the President’s response to the development of new cloning technology. Memoranda and emails released by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library on Friday document Kagan’s involvement in crafting an anti-life position and legislative proposal. In a May 29, 1997 memo to the President, Kagan and Jack...

White House memos from 1997, when Elena Kagan was a top domestic policy advisor to President Clinton, show that Kagan -- nominated to the Supreme Court by President Obama -- recommended that the Clinton administration permit cloning of human embryos for research purposes. Writing just months after Scottish researchers had announced the birth of a cloned sheep, Kagan and another Clinton aide recommended that the president announce a ban on cloning that would lead to the birth of human infants, but emphasized that the policy "would not ban the creation of cloned embryos for research purposes.

Arizona is joining Louisiana in prohibiting scientists from creating "human-animal" hybrids. Louisiana enacted its law last year, and Gov. Jan Brewer signed the Arizona legislation into law on Friday. The Arizona statute effect in July. It prohibits human cloning through various means, including fertilizing human eggs with nonhuman sperm and vice versa. It also makes it a crime to knowingly destroy human embryonic stem cells during research. As in Louisiana, supporters of the Arizona legislation said it would prohibit human cloning and protect the dignity of human life at its earliest stages. Critics variously ridiculed the bill and said it...

Last year DISCOVER asked the question, “Did We Mate With Neanderthals, or Did We Murder Them?” Now, Zach Zorich at Archaeology magazine is asking another big question about our hominid siblings: Should we bring them back? Thanks to a slew of recent advances, the possibility is getting closer. 80beats reported a year ago that researchers had published the rough draft of the Neanderthal genome. However, that’s likely to contain many errors because it’s so difficult to reconstruct ancient DNA. Within hours of death, cells begin to break down in a process called apoptosis. The dying cells release enzymes that chop...

A plant that started life during the last Ice Age is still going strong in the arid scrublands of California, scientists revealed today. Researchers believe the Jurupa Oak has been around for 13,000 years, making it the oldest living plant in the world. The oak is made up of a community of cloned bushes and scientists believe it has managed to survive the extreme effects of climate change by regenerating.

ENID, Oklahoma (Reuters) - To the untrained eye, Pollard Farms looks much like any other cattle ranch. Similar looking cows are huddled in similar looking pens. But some of the cattle here don't just resemble each other. They are literally identical -- clear down to their genes. Of the 400-some cattle in Barry Pollard's herd of mostly Black Angus cattle there are 22 clones, genetic copies of some of the most productive livestock the world has ever known. Pollard, a neurosurgeon and owner of Pollard Farms, says such breeding technology is at the forefront of a new era in animal...