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The first so-called “DNA cloning” was performed in 1972 by Molecular Biologist Paul Berg who integrated and expanded a quimeric gene - a mixture of both bacterial and viral origin. Since then, Escherichia Coli (a Gram negative bacterium that is commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded animals; vegetal cloning (largely used in agronomy since the mid-1960s), and animal cloning (from reptiles, fish and amphibian) have been instrumental in paving the way to the successful cloning of mammals since 1986, which cleared the way for human reproductive cloning, leading us to the scientists who vehemently oppose the practice.....

First...we must get the racism out of the way.... Then there would that little trouble with right-wing protesters, and how to deal with them. Then, of course, there is the FINNALL SOLUUUUTIONNN, the reinvention of health care as we know it....

The comedian Al Franken will be welcomed by fellow Democrats at a lunch on Capitol Hill today after he has been sworn in as senator, taking the party’s Senate vote bank to the magic threshold of 60. His arrival makes the Democrats the first party in three decades to attain the fabled super majority, allowing them – in theory – to override Republican filibusters and implement their legislative agenda. A week after Mr Franken was declared Senator of Minnesota, however, doubts are growing as to how politically useful a super majority will be when the hard bargaining over controversial issues...

After the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously rejected his lawsuit today, Republican Norm Coleman graciously conceded the bitterly disputed contest over the second U.S. Senate seat for Minnesota. None of this changes the fact that as a senator Al Franken is not legitimate. The election was stolen at the precinct level, during the recount, and during the post-election litigation. Never forget the role that ACORN played in this. As ACORN-aligned Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a former community organizer, presided over the vote-counting process, Coleman's original lead dwindled. The morning after the election, Coleman led Franken by 725 votes. Over the...

Republican Norm Coleman's lead in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race grew slightly today as a special board began refereeing more than a thousand disputed ballots. Coleman led Democrat Al Franken by 264 votes, up from 188, after the five-member state Canvassing Board spent some five hours squinting at piles of ballots trying to figure out exactly what voters intended. Coleman's gain may be deceptive, since the board focused almost entirely on challenges from the Franken campaign that were mostly brought to try to keep a Coleman vote off the board. Coleman added 98 votes to his total and Franken picked up...

One Democratic operative suggests keeping track of Barack Obama’s cabinet selections with a March Madness-type tournament chart. While no official announcements have been made, a controlled series of leaks have given a good sense of who's still in contention, and which big names have been bounced from the bracket. The new administration still has some major posts to fill, including heads for the departments of Defense, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Labor, and Energy, not to mention the Environmental Protection Agency. But a number of the biggest prizes seem to have already been won, and a handful of serious contenders...

Minnesota Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken talks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2008, after a meeting with Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid of Nev

MPs have voted to allow the creation of "frankenstein" embyros for research into tackling diseases. In the first of a series of free votes on the most controversial aspects of the Human Fertility and Embryology Bill, 336 MPs voted against the amendment to ban all use of human-animal embryos. Gordon Brown had encouraged members of all parties to halt the amendment and Tory leader David Cameron also voted against it.

A bit of inspirational vision from Thomas Jefferson. A dose of national supremacy from James Monroe. Theodore Roosevelt's bully pulpit, Ronald Reagan's folksy charm and Bill Clinton's empathy. Add it all up and what have you got? The ultimate president. Of course, there's no such thing as a perfect chief executive, but that doesn't stop Americans from looking for one in the bits and pieces of presidents past. A Frankenstein president might look like this: HONESTY: George Washington didn't chop down the cherry tree, but he was an honorable man. Mason Locke Weems made up the story as a parable...

PARIS (AFP) - In experiments that would make Dr. Frankenstein jealous, US scientists have coaxed recycled hearts taken from animal cadavers into beating in the laboratory after reseeding them with live cells, according to a study released Sunday. If extended to humans, the procedure could provide an almost limitless supply of hearts, and possibly other organs, to millions of terminally ill people waiting helplessly for a new lease on life. Approximately 50,000 patients in the United States alone die every year for lack of a donor heart, and some 22 million people worldwide are living with the threat of heart...

SOTO CANO AIR BASE, Honduras, Nov. 1, 2007 – In the spirit of Halloween, an airman here built his very own version of “Frankenstein’s monster.” Air Force Tech. Sgt. Robert Russell, Armed Forces Network Honduras chief engineer, shows off the "Frankenstein computer" he built from spare parts and a shipping box. The computer took about two weeks to build. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Sonny Cohrs, USAF  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Robert Russell, chief engineer for American Forces Network Honduras, is somewhat of a computer guru. When his wife called and said she needed a...

The larger worm in the top image is a hermaphrodite -- a worm with male and female organs -- while the worm on the bottom is male. Biologists at the Brain Institute at the University of Utah genetically manipulated the brains of hermaphrodite worms so they were attracted to other worms of the same sex. The study showed sexual orientation is wired in the worms' brains. Credit: Jamie White, University of Utah University of Utah biologists genetically manipulated nematode worms so the animals were attracted to worms of the same sex – part of a study that shows sexual...

Peace activist Sheehan taken into custody in Conyers' office 7/24/2007, 8:05 a.m. EDT By NATASHA T. METZLER The Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) — Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan was arrested at the Capitol for disorderly conduct, shortly after saying she would run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over the California Democrat's refusal to try to impeach President Bush. Sheehan on Monday was taken into custody inside Rep. John Conyers' office, where she had spent an hour imploring him to launch impeachment proceedings against Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Conyers, D-Mich., chairs the House Judiciary Committee, where any impeachment effort would...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Making human-animal embryos for scientific experiments should be allowed because of the benefits to science and medicine, British experts said in a report released for Sunday. Such embryos should never, however, be implanted into either a woman or an animal, said the Academy of Medical Sciences. The combinations would include animal eggs and the nucleus, containing the genetic material, of a human being, or human embryos that carry the genetic material of an animal, the independent advisory body said. A cloning technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT for short, involves removing the nucleus from an...

- G. K. Chesterson: The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. - The horror this week at Vtech is beyond what is found in monster novels ... but an explanation little talked about regarding 'why' can be found in one novel: Frankenstein. ' "Devil," I exclaimed, "do you dare approach me?" ' ... these are the first words of Mr. Frankenstein when he confronts his creation for the first time. This same creature who he failed to name. The would-be doctor, scientist even, had...

Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, was born near Nottingham on December 12, 1731. He was educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh and settled first near Lichfield and later at Derby. A remarkable polymath, he became a best selling poet during the same years that he worked as a country doctor, naturalist, medical botanist, and inventor. Darwin expounded one of the earliest theories of evolution ("all vegetables and animals now living were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones"), and he described the importance of sexual selection to continuing changes within species ("the final cause of this contest among males seems...

Say you're a woman who wants to have fertility treatment but can't afford the cost, which can total many thousands of dollars. What if you could get the treatment at a substantially reduced rate by agreeing to donate half the eggs you produce for stem-cell research? Interested? British women may get a crack at that deal in a few months, under a plan pursued by Dr. Alison Murdoch of Newcastle University. This concept, which resembles a strategy sometimes used to get eggs for fertility treatment, is just one of several new efforts to boost the supply of human eggs needed...

Hidden deep in a Russian forest, and guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot intruders on sight, the medical research laboratories on the outskirts of Moscow were one of the Soviet Union's best-kept secrets. So the carefully-vetted journalists who were allowed past the forbidding perimeter fence on a cold February morning in 1954 were both apprehensive and curious about what lay ahead. Led to a courtyard outside an austere brick building, they waited in the bright winter sunshine to find out why they had been summoned. For a few minutes, only the sound of birdsong and the rustling of leaves...

In the contest for oddest pronouncement in a State of the Union address, high marks should go to President Bush’s call last January for a national ban on “creating human-animal hybrids.� Fortunately, the modern biotech laboratory does not yet resemble H.G. Wells’s island of Dr. Moreau, that fictional place where an exiled scientist blends man and beast by vivisection. Not even our most skillful, least scrupulous genetic engineers can manufacture humanzees to provide spare parts or serve as semi-skilled labor. We are not yet so talented or so depraved. Yet the President’s call to action did not come out of...

Close window Published online: 21 September 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060918-10 Naturally dead embryos yield stem cells 'Stalled' embryos could be new source of cell lines.Alison Abbott The new technique could remove the need to deliberately destroy embryos for stem cells.Punchstock Researchers have succeeded in developing a human embryonic stem-cell line from an embryo that had died naturally. The development may offer a non-problematic source of embryonic cells in countries such as Germany and the United States where the law does not allow the use of cell lines whose creation caused the destruction of embryos. If the work bears fruit, researchers...

In this era of a big-spending Republican administration, the differences between conservatives and liberals have shrunk so much, it's hard to tell who's who. Take embryonic stem-cell research. President Bush has limited taxpayer funding of this research on right-to-life, not fiscal-conservative, grounds. He's not against all federal financing of the research, but he doesn't want to expand what's already being done. Conservatives generally support him. Liberals oppose Bush's stance because they like funding what they favor, and they favor stem-cell research. They often describe Bush's policy as a ban on research. That's not true. Researchers at Harvard, Vanderbilt, and other...

Whether it’s delivered with flashlight pointed skyward below the chin as all are gathered around an open fire, or, as Halloween fades, it comes in the form of the latest horror movie or Charlie Brown TV special, most everyone enjoys a scary story. For the most part, people like these stories because it enlivens their imagination and thrills their spirit. People also enjoy these stories because they know—no matter how realistic they may appear—they are fantasy, make-believe. In movie making they call it “willing suspension of disbelief.” I am no different, but there is a story that deeply frightens me...

LIBERAL backbencher Alby Schultz has warned against the freeing-up of stem cell research laws, saying it could lead to the practice of "Frankenstein science" in Australia. Prime Minister John Howard has signalled he will allow MPs a conscience vote that could overturn a Cabinet ban on therapeutic cloning. But Mr Schultz, who lost an eye several years ago in a domestic accident, said he would not back the vote - even on the chance that the research might give him a new eye. "It's the precursor, in my opinion, if the vote goes through to embryonic cloning and I have...

One morning earlier this month, the pilot of a Gulfstream jet radioed a tiny airfield high in the Colorado mountains, asking for permission to land. On board the private plane, which had taken off two hours earlier, were two senior members of the controversial Church of Scientology. As it taxied to a halt at the end of the runway at Telluride Airport, the emissaries were met by a blacked-out sports utility vehicle and driven three miles to the secluded 250-acre estate of actor Tom Cruise. Their mission was not, however, to minister to the Hollywood superstar. Instead, their appointment was...

Science’s Stem Cell Scam By Michael Fumento Thursday, July 20, 2006 Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) receive tremendous media attention, with oft-repeated claims that they have the potential to cure virtually every disease known. Yet there are spoilsports, self included, who point out that they have yet to even make it into a human clinical trial. This is even as alternatives – adult stem cells (ASCs) from numerous places in the body as well as umbilical cord blood and placenta – are curing diseases here and now and have been doing so for decades. And that makes ESC advocates very, very...

Oregon's two senators voted with the Senate majority Tuesday to overturn the president's limits on embryonic stem-cell research, setting the stage for the first veto of the Bush administration. "Please, Mr. President, don't veto this bill," said Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., noting that his family has a history of Parkinson's disease. "Such a veto, I fear, may only throw out hope, healing and human life along with the unused embryos." Sixty-three senators voted to allow federally funded researchers to conduct medical research on surplus embryos from fertility clinics. The bipartisan vote was enough to move the bill to the president's...

WASHINGTON (AP) President Bush has issued the first veto of his presidency, rejecting a bill to expand federal research on stem cells obtained from embryos.

"The clip I used is several years old, but I only recently saw it for the first time and felt so inspired that I had to do this. It was too perfect not to try," Daphne writes in introducing her 3:42 minute video on YouTube. Daphne's video combines clips from "Young Frankenstein" and various appearance of Microsoft CEO Steve "Monkey Boy" Ballmer. "Young FrankenSteve" was added to YouTube on May 16, 2006, but, thanks to MacDailyNews reader "Frank," we only now stumbled upon it. As of this post, the video's only been viewed 4,900 times, so for those who haven't...

Two women create a baby!!!! Watch out! Here's some news for all those people who have it stuck in their mind that if there were only females left on earth they would not survive because they could not reproduce without sperm. Your going to have to come up with another reason two women shouldn't be together. "Scientists have created mice pups from two female mice. No male mice or sperm were involved. The offspring were all female. How did this happen and will humans soon have the option to create babies without men? Parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, is defined as...

WAUWATOSA, WI (AP) -- Gov. Jim Doyle directed the state on Tuesday to spend $5 million to help recruit stem cell researchers to Wisconsin.The state Department of Commerce will spend the money marketing the state as a leader in stem cell research under the executive order Doyle signed Tuesday at the Medical College of Wisconsin. "I think we should settle for nothing less than being the stem cell leader, not only in this country but in the world," Doyle said. Doyle said during this year's State of the State address that he wants Wisconsin to capture 10 percent of the...

While Air America Radio's loss of two affiliates in Phoenix and Missoula, Montana is generating news this week, the company itself probably hasn't been able to give either city a second thought. Why? In a development sure to rip the heart right out of the liberal radio network's already ailing body, it appears extremely likely their leased New York City flagship station WLIB-AM will soon abandon Air America programming. Even worse, litigation looks probable over the station's lease. While the network's last day on WLIB isn't known for certain, an internal source providing backing documentation points to the end of...

MIAMI -- Former Attorney General Janet Reno got up and sang Aretha Franklin's "Respect" at a Miami fundraiser Thursday night. The karaoke performance was caught on tape. It happened at an event honoring the 10th anniversary of the Human Services Coalition. Proceeds went to help fight poverty. Reno suffers from Parkinson's disease, but that hasn't stopped her public appearances. Recently, she gave speeches on law enforcement at the University of Iowa and Pennsylvania State University.

<p>WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. John Kerry has decided to support a filibuster to block the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, CNN's Congressional Correspondent Ed Henry reported Thursday. Kerry, in Davos, Switzerland, to attend the World Economic Forum, was marshaling support in phone calls during the day, Henry said.</p>

Since it was on one of the lower rated Sunday shows (and well... is Kerry), I figured this might have been missed by alot of people. For your entertainment... Pt 1 Pt 2

MEIRA, Pakistan - Former U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry toured earthquake-devastated parts of northern Pakistan on Saturday, distributing school uniforms and meeting local leaders at a tent village funded partly by both the United States and communist Cuba. The visit came amid warnings that heavy snow would blanket the quake zone over the next four to five days, possibly triggering avalanches along the jagged peaks and promising more misery for the 3.5 million people left homeless by the Oct. 8 quake. "The relief operations will be affected badly," the Pakistan Meteorological Department said. Kerry toured a camp housing some 18,000...

British scientists are seeking permission to create hybrid embryos in the lab by fusing human cells with rabbit eggs. If granted consent, the team will use the embryos to produce stem cells that carry genetic defects, in the hope that studying them will help understand the complex mechanisms behind incurable human diseases. The proposal drew strong criticism from opponents to embryo research who yesterday challenged the ethics of the research and branded the work repugnant. Plans for the experiments have been put forward by Professor Chris Shaw, a neurologist and expert in motor neurone disease at King's College London, and...

Mixed chicks sing song of a different species Bird brains hardwired to learn own songs By ANNE MCILROY McGill University researcher Evan Balaban performs brain transplants on chickens to make them sing like quails. He takes bits of brain from quail embryos and attaches them to the brains of embryonic chickens still snug in their eggs. When they hatch, the chickens look normal, except for the dark, quail-coloured feathers sprouting out of their heads. But they do not sound normal. Instead of crowing the classic cock-a-doodle-doo, they sing the two introductory notes and the long trill of a quail song....

HOUSTON, October 27, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An experiment has been underway for a month in a Houston Texas where parents are permitted to ask scientists for a child with the gender of their choice. The procedure involves preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) which is able to detect the sex of embryos created by in vitro fertilization (IVF) prior to their implantation in their mothers' wombs. While sex selection via PGD has been allowed in some cases where sex-linked diseases are concerned, the clinical trial is seeking to gage the impact of sex selection at the whim of the parents. According to...

"And so basically, what it looks like is going to happen is that Libby and Karl Rove are going to be executed" because "outing a CIA agent is treason," left-wing author and radio talk show host Al Franken asserted Friday night, to audience laughter, on CBS's Late Show with David Letterman. Franken qualified his hard-edged stire: "Yeah, and I don't know how I feel about it because I'm basically against the death penalty, but they are going to be executed it looks like." Franken later suggested that President Bush is at risk of receiving the same punishment, since Karl Rove...

Artificial wombs will be "reality" within 20 years, according to the London Times. Indeed, 20 years seems a conservative estimate given an earlier report in The Guardian, another UK newspaper, which predicted them for 2008. Discussion of ectogenesis — growing an embryo outside the mother's womb — may sound wildly futuristic. But a few years ago, cloning and genetic modification seemed impossible. A few years before that, the idea of a 66-year-old woman giving birth was absurd; it happened last January. And only last week, British scientists received an official go-ahead to create human embryos from two mothers with no...

BRITISH scientists have been given permission to create human embryos that will have three genetic parents. The fertility watchdog cleared a team at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne yesterday to conduct an experiment to prevent genetic disease by merging single-cell embryos with donated eggs. The decision to approve the procedure on appeal, after two previous applications were rejected, is controversial because it could eventually lead to the birth of children who carry genes from two mothers and a father. It also opens the possibility of “germ-line” genetic engineering, because any children born would carry added genes that would be...

It is a good idea to expand federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research. It is a bad idea to do that without prohibiting research that uses embryos created specifically to be used in research and destroyed. What is deeply troubling about the Castle-DeGette stem-cell bill that passed the House and will soon roar through the Senate is that it combines the good with the bad: expansion with no limit. The expansion--federal funding for stem cells derived from some of the thousands of discarded fertility-clinic embryos that are already slated for extinction--is good because President Bush's sincere and principled Aug. 9,...

Critics demanded an apology Thursday from the founder of the Christian ministry Focus on the Family after he compared the ethics of embryonic stem cell research to Nazi experiments on Holocaust victims. James Dobson made the comments Wednesday during his radio show, which reaches an estimated 220 million people worldwide. Dobson was criticizing Sen. Bill Frist and others who support expanded stem cell research in hopes that stem cells one day could be used to replace cells damaged from such conditions as diabetes, spinal cord injury or Parkinson's disease. Dobson and other opponents object to the research because embryos are...

Under a bill the Legislature could take up next year, Florida would promote and provide money for medical research using embryonic stem cells that would otherwise be discarded. Rep. Franklin Sands, a Democrat from Broward County, said Wednesday he will file a bill that would specifically authorize the use of embryonic stem cells produced by in-vitro fertilization that aren't implanted and would otherwise be discarded or destroyed. The measure would also provide for some state funding for studies involving the embryonic cells, which Sands and other supporters say could hold the key to cures for a range of diseases and...

It had the face of Frankenstein and the hands of a werewolf.Outfitted in jeans and flannel shirt, the creature - stuffed with crumpled newspaper - hung by the neck on a homemade gallows outside a home in the Allendale neighborhood.To its owner, "Bob" was a Halloween decoration. But to Omali Yeshitela, it was a racially charged symbol of hate.On Tuesday, as police officers on the scene scrambled to contact the homeowner at work, Yeshitela and others from the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement tore the dummy down.

in today's Wal-Mart ad, note the Kerry doll in the upper left corner.:

The pundits are already prognosticating about last night’s presidential debates. Many say John Kerry “won,” but that’s not yet entirely clear. Am I the only person who noticed Kerry’s constant smirking, nodding, head-shaking, and general smugness while the President answered questions? Didn’t anyone else notice Jim Lehrer’s loaded questions directed at President Bush? Maybe Kerry scored a few points for debating, but he certainly didn’t win the November election early. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll of 615 registered voters who viewed the debate showed that Kerry “fared better” than Bush, but also revealed that those same voters still preferred President Bush...

The Washington ComPost is soiling their panties in excitement over a speech Kerry gave at New York University. The speech was received here as the beginning of Kerry's Incredible Hulk moment, when, angry and provoked, he finally unleashes his inner demon. Close, Unwashed Composties.. Right idea, wrong inhuman monster.... Meanwhile, Kerry's supporters are convinced that he just needs the right slogan du jour. We haven't heard the most recent one (Operation Rosie Palms... erm, Rosy Scenario) was introduced on Sunday since oh, at least Monday. Still, "for the first time, I'm thinking about it," says Ellen Jacob, a Democratic activist...

WizBand blog has a photo of Al Franken getting in somebodies face on radio row.