Free Republic

In what may seem more like a Hollywood science-fiction plot, as in the forthcoming movie "Splice," lawmakers are trying to prevent scientists from combining human and animal embryos to make "human-animal hybrids." In "Splice," two scientists defy ethical boundaries and splice together human and animal DNA to create a new organism, also known as a chimera.

Monday May 17, 2010 Bishop Says Nun is Automatically Excommunicated for Rubberstamping Hospital Abortion By Peter J. SmithPHOENIX, Arizona, May 17, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Bishop of Phoenix has announced that a Catholic nun and administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix has automatically excommunicated herself by approving an abortion on a woman who was 11-weeks pregnant, and whose life hospital officials allege they were trying to save. Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted said the excommunications apply to all involved, and lambasted the hospital’s defense of their decision by comparing the ill woman’s unborn child to a...

After World War II, the U.S. government invested an enormous amount of money in medicine; medical research, medical procedures and medical technologies. This investment made contemporary scientific medicine into American medicine, characterized by a continuing flow of new treatment possibilities. These advances raised all kinds of ethical questions. Some were personal and individual, others were social and political. Both type questions are addressed by a new academic discipline called bioethics. The first attempt to develop a scientific medicine took place in Greece in the 5th century B.C. It was called Hippocratic medicine. Closely linked with this first scientific medicine was...

Organs for Sale? by: Brittany Fortier, September 11, 2009 For those in need of a kidney transplant, it can be a difficult journey to find a willing donor. Circumstances have become so desperate for those waiting for a posthumous kidney that they sometimes resort to advertising their need on billboards and websites. Even worse, some may turn to the black market. On August 24, 2009, the American Enterprise Institute discussed these issues with Dr. Sally Satel, a resident scholar at AEI and beneficiary of a kidney transplant. Satel argued that the best way to procure more organ donations is to...

MELBOURNE, Australia, October 21, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A prominent Melbourne doctor has written that, contrary to popular belief, most organ donations take place before the donor is actually dead.  He argues that the vague criterion of "brain death" has blinded potential donors to the fact that their organs are often harvested while they are still alive.Pediatric intensive care specialist Dr. James Tibballs published his controversial views in the Journal of Law and Medicine earlier this month, calling upon medical institutions to review their organ harvesting guidelines to ensure that donors know that they may be volunteering to surrender their life...

LifeNews.com Note: Ken Connor is the chairman of the Center for a Just Society in Washington and a leading pro-life attorney who helped Terri Schiavo's family try to save her life. He is a former president of the Family Research Council. Even the most despicable ideas can be made palatable when euphemisms are used to spin them. That's why abortion advocates call themselves "pro-choice" rather than "pro abortion." It's also why they talk about "terminating a pregnancy" rather than "killing a baby." Controlling the language not only controls the argument, it often determines the outcome of the argument. Proponents...

There's new hope for the five million people in the United States who live with heart failure. Scientists say they have been able to grow a rat heart in a lab. They were also successful at getting it to start beating. About 50,000 people die each year waiting for a heart donor. But that all may change thanks to a rat heart, built by scientists at the University of Minnesota. "Everyone has cells," Dr. Doris Taylor told CBN News. "What's lacking is a way to put that together in a 3-D structure that lets you create an organ," she explained....

All across the land this fall, people have been gathering to promote awareness and acceptance of Down syndrome. Central to their message is the idea that people with the condition are valued family members who lead happy, fulfilling lives. At the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, scientists have been meeting to develop research agendas to improve the lives of people with Down syndrome, the genetic condition that results when a person has three copies of the 21st chromosome instead of the usual pair. But in the places where medicine is practiced, a very...

Harvesting stem cells without tears What are we to think about the fact that Nature (and for believers, Nature's God) profligately creates and destroys human embryos? John Opitz, a professor of pediatrics, human genetics, and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah, testified before the President's Council on Bioethics that between 60 and 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women's normal menstrual flows unnoticed. This is not miscarriage we're talking about. The women and their husbands or partners never even know that conception has taken place; the embryos disappear from their wombs in...

Last week the scientific world was abuzz with the news that adult stem cells could be used to regenerate tissues and cure diseases. This week, the political world is abuzz with the news of President Bush’s veto of Congressional legislation and his own alternative Executive Order for Expanding Approved Stem Cell Lines in Ethically Responsible Ways. While the Usual Suspects are busy denouncing Bush for being anti-science, the media debate completely obscures the economic interests at stake. Big bio-tech companies stand to make money from government subsidy of embryonic stem cell research. By contrast, the use of stem cells from...

In the 40 minutes before a woman's death last month at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, two separate callers pleaded with 911 dispatchers to send help because the hospital staff was ignoring her as she writhed on the floor, according to audio recordings of the calls. "My wife is dying and the nurses don't want to help her out," Jose Prado, the woman's boyfriend, told the 911 dispatcher through an interpreter. He was calling from a pay phone outside the hospital, his tone increasingly desperate as he described how his 43-year-old girlfriend was spitting up blood. The Los Angeles County...

Six staff members at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital — including a nurse and two nursing assistants — saw or walked past a dying woman writhing on the floor of the emergency room lobby last month but did not help her, according to a report made public Friday. Their discipline: a letter outlining how they should behave in the future. The six are in addition to two others whose roles have already been made public by The Times: a contract janitor who cleaned the floor around the woman as she vomited blood and a triage nurse who oversaw the whole...

Ethicists Disagree On Experimenting During CrisesThe federal government is undertaking the most ambitious set of studies ever mounted under a controversial arrangement that allows researchers to conduct some kinds of medical experiments without first getting patients' permission. The $50 million, five-year project, which will involve more than 20,000 patients in 11 sites in the United States and Canada, is designed to improve treatment after car accidents, shootings, cardiac arrest and other emergencies. The three studies, organizers say, offer an unprecedented opportunity to find better ways to resuscitate people whose hearts suddenly stop, to stabilize patients who go into shock and...

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...

Scientists have proved for the first time that sperm grown from embryonic stem cells can be used to produce offspring.

[The rhythm method and embryonic death J Med Ethics 2006; 32: 355-6]The “rhythm method” may kill off more embryos than other contraceptive methods, such as coils, morning after pills, and oral contraceptives, suggests an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.The method relies on abstinence during the most fertile period of a woman’s menstrual cycle. For a woman who has regular 28 day cycles, this is around days 10 to 17 of the cycle.It is the only method of birth control condoned by the Catholic Church, because it doesn’t interfere with conception, so allowing nature to take its course. It...

In a shocking breach of medical ethics, the leading stem-cell and cloning researcher in South Korea admitted last week that he used eggs donated by subordinates in his work. According to Nature magazine, the junior researcher “felt obliged to donate after making mistakes early in the experiment that wasted eggs and set the team back by months.” This gross abuse of position and power is a lapse that Concerned Women for America (CWA) has warned could happen, and the case demonstrates growing concerns about the ethics of research involving human cloning. Hwang became a sensation in South Korea, a...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 - Troubled by news accounts of medical participation in coercive interrogations at Guantánamo Bay and the resulting unease in the professional medical community, the Pentagon led an intense one-day tour of the detention camp last month, several participants said in recent days. The purpose of the trip, some of the participants said, was for the military leadership to convince the ethicists, psychiatrists, psychologists and others who visited the detention camp at the United States Naval Station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that what was occurring there did not violate medical ethics and was necessary to strengthen the nation's...

SEMINOLE – Death and dying, hospice, palliative care, advanced directives, living wills and bereavement are among the end-of-life issues to be presented by the Applied Ethics Institute of St. Petersburg College at the college’s Digitorium on the Seminole Campus on Thursday, Nov. 17, 7 to 9 p.m. The free forum will be moderated by Mary Tittle, Ph.D., RN, College of Nursing, St. Petersburg College and begin with presentations from David A. Weiland, M.D., The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast; Patricia Thieleman, Ph.D., RN, College of Nursing, St. Petersburg College; and Hanna Osman, Ph.D., College of Public Health, University of South...

Family members are investigating what they consider to be suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of a nursing home patient at the center of a life and death tug-of-war reminiscent of the Terri Schiavo tragedy. Seventy-nine-year-old Jimmy Chambers died in the early morning hours of Oct. 24 after the tracheotomy tubes that deliver oxygen from a ventilator to a hole in his neck became unhooked. Family members were told Chambers, a resident of the Anne Maria Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in North Augusta, S.C., apparently pulled the interlocking tubes apart. "We're having it investigated. We're just incredulous," Chambers' daughter, Deanna Potter,...