Free Republic

Researchers in Germany have grown complete spinal cords – partly thanks to a gene called sonic hedgehog.As regenerative medicine and stem cell technologies continue to progress, so the list of tissues and organs that can be grown from scratch – and potentially replaced – continues to grow. In the past few years, researchers have used stem cells to grow windpipes, bladders, urethras and vaginas in the lab, and, in some cases, successfully transplanted them into patients. Others are making progress in growing liver and heart tissue; one team in London is busy growing blood vessels, noses and ears; and some...

BATON ROUGE, LA, June 2, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- For the second time in as many years, Governor Bobby Jindal has vetoed a bill that would have made it legal to enter into a contract with a surrogate mother in Louisiana. Both vetoes took place despite enormous support in the state legislature. In his veto letter Jindal, who is Catholic and considered a likely GOP presidential candidate in 2016, said he had concerns about "how this legislation impacts the way we value human life."

You don’t have to be a Eurosceptic to have issues with Big Europe. Given five years of record unemployment and austerity budgets in Europe, elections for the European Parliament, held last week, were always expected to produce victories for the populist parties that reject the EU and its political values. But the scale of their success – parties described as “far right” gained about one-sixth of the seats in the Strasbourg-based assembly, and a couple polled better than their own governing parties at home -- has given a jolt to the European establishment. Tens of millions of people are...

Cardinal Seán P. O'Malley of Boston speaks at a press conference for the 2012 USCCB Fall General Assembly. Credit: Michelle Bauman/CNA. Boston, Mass., May 15, 2013 / 02:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley called the successful production of embryonic stem cells by cloning human embryos an “abuse” which ignores the dignity and value of the human person. “The news that researchers have developed a technique for human cloning is deeply troubling on many levels,” the archbishop of Boston, who chairs U.S. bishops' pro-life activities committee, said May 15. “Creating new human lives in the laboratory solely to...

A site in China contains 190-million-year old organic remains from non-avian dinosaurs and dinosaur embryos, and some of the world’s oldest known eggshells, according to a new study. The study, published in the journal Nature, reveals for the first time how dinosaur embryos grew, developed and moved around within their eggs. The organic remains -- collagen discovered in bone -- also fuel hopes that many mysteries about dinosaurs may be resolved in the not-too-distant future. “Our hope is that we may be able to recover collagen from these tissues in the future and do additional analyses,” project leader Robert Reisz...

WASHINGTON -- Shinya Yamanaka, a scientist at Kyoto University, loved stem-cell research. But he didn't want to destroy embryos. So he figured out a way around the problem. In a paper published five years ago in Cell, Yamanaka and six colleagues showed how "induced pluripotent stem cells" could be derived from adult cells and potentially substituted, in research and therapy, for embryonic stem cells. This week, that discovery earned him a Nobel Prize, shared with British scientist John Gurdon. But the prize announcement and much of the media coverage missed half the story. Yamanaka's venture wasn't just an experiment. It...

Evangelical Christians, it seems, are adopting embryos at an increasing rate, and the secular media are noticing the trend. Last week, religion journalist Krista Kapralos wrote about the theological and missional underpinnings of born-again believers giving birth to "unused embryos." In a few minutes, I plan to talk to her about whether we should see this as something God calls us to do. I mentioned, awhile back, that I had received some kick-back from someone who opposed any talk of so-called "snowflake adoption," and objected to such an adoption happening in his extended family. How, he wondered, could I support...

In addition to stopping funding for the Planned Parenthood abortion business, Komen for the Cure has also quietly stopped funding embryonic stem cell research centers, another concern for pro-life advocates.As LifeNews reported last July, Karen Malec of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer spent time examining KomenÂ’s 990 Forms for the IRS for 2010 and she found that Komen has active relationships with at least five research groups or educational facilities that engage in embryonic stem cell research, which requires the destruction of unborn children in their earliest days for stem cells that have yet to help any patients.The return showed...

Subsidies: A firm that received tax dollars to pursue embryonic stem cell research abandons what was touted as the most promising avenue of research for medical miracles. Then there's that "conscience thing." When Geron Corp. announced in January 2010 that the first clinical trial using its embryonic stem cells to treat an actual human patient was under way, its stock shot up 6.4%. Geron got the first Food and Drug Administration license to use embryonic stem cells to treat people in a clinical trial, in this case patients with a spinal cord injury. Last week Geron announced that it was...

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...

As if the new York Times couldn’t sink any further down the hole of warped and twisted pro-abortion activism, the Gray Lady is out with yet another “news” piece that moves the newspaper further beyond the pale.Ruth Pawder is out today with a new story titled “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy,” that focuses on “selective reduction” – the euphemistic phrase given to name the destruction of one or more unborn children in a multiple pregnancy situation where a mother has more than one baby resulting from an IVF pregnancy involving the implantation of multiple human embryos.The Times never makes it past the...

Australian ethicist working at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics claims that humanity has a “moral obligation” to use in vitro fertilization (IVF) to select the most intelligent embryos for the good of society, with the obvious implication that the less intelligent “surplus” embryos should simply be destroyed. Professor Julian Savulescu of Melbourne made the statement while commenting on an economic modeling research paper by Oxford University ethicists Andres Sandberg and Nick Bostrom, who claim that a rise in humanity’s IQ would result in a reduction in poverty, welfare dependency, crowding of jails, school dropout rates, out-of-wedlock births, and...

Latest Assault on the Prebornby William F. JasperEmbryonic stem cell research is neither an acceptable nor an ethical means of scientific discovery but is instead the purely utilitarian, cold-blooded murder of preborn children.‘‘Which one of my children would you kill? Which one would you take?" John Borden pointedly asked the committee members in the packed congressional hearing on July17th. He was holding his twin 9-month-old sons, Mark and Luke, while his wife, Lucinda Borden, held up a photo of the two infants, along with an embryonic sibling who did not survive, as they had appeared on January 31, 2000...

If two homosexual men want to use in vitro fertilization to conceive a baby and then use genetics technology to ensure the baby is also "gay," while disposing of any "straight" embryos, would the law have any ethical problems with that? America's leading ethicist in the field of human reproduction has written a paper that argues future homosexual couples should have "the right" to do exactly that. John A. Robertson of the University of Texas Law School is the chair of the Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and an advocate of what his book "Children of...

In futuristic movies like "Aliens 2" and "12 Monkeys," prisoners are bar coded for easy identification. But today's reality is even wilder: Scientists have proposed bar-coding embryos. Researchers from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain have just finished testing a method for imprinting microscopic bar codes on mouse embryos -- a procedure they plan to test soon on humans. The venture is meant to avoid mismatches during in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer procedures. But privacy experts and children's rights advocates were instantly concerned by the concept of "direct labeling" of embryos, calling for transparency in the process. “An...

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...

Science: Supporters of California's failed 2004 stem-cell law will ask strapped taxpayers to support another $3 billion bond initiative in 2014. Maybe it's time to restore fiscal sanity as well as science to its rightful place. When it was passed in 2004, Proposition 71, with its $3 billion state fund and 10-year mandate for embryonic stem-cell research (ESCR), held out the promise of imminent miracle cures for everything from spinal disorders to Parkinson's. One campaign ad showed actor Christopher Reeve, aka Superman, asking California voters to "stand up for those who can't." Some six years later, with about $1.1 billion...

When there is no private sector push for a scientific breakthrough, maybe it is not such a breakthrough after all. “Researchers from the University of Michigan have created the first embryonic stem cell line developed in the state and the line is making news as Detroit hosts the World Stem Cell Summit,” Steven Ertelt reports on LifeNews.com. “However, a pro-life group is disappointed by the news because the obtaining of the cells came at the death of an unborn child.” “Scientist Gary Smith, who derived the line, told the Detroit News that the establishment of the line of human embryonic...

Bioethics: A federal judge rules that the administration violated congressional intent when it lifted restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. No, this will not usher in a new dark age. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth was striking enough. Lamberth said that when President Obama lifted Bush administration restrictions on ESCR, he violated the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. First passed in 1996, and passed every year as part of the federal budget, Dickey-Wicker blocks federal funds for stem cell research in which human embryos are destroyed. Perhaps more striking is the press coverage of Lamberth's ruling. The...

Scientists have stumbled across the first example of a photosynthetic organism living inside a vertebrate's cells. The discovery is a surprise because the adaptive immune systems of vertebrates generally destroy foreign biological material. In this case, however, a symbiotic alga seems to be surviving unchallenged — and might be giving its host a solar-powered metabolic boost. Algae cohabit with salamander embryos in their eggs — and inside their cells.T. LEVIN/PHOTOLIBRARY.COM The embryos of the spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) have long been known to enjoy a mutualistic relationship with the single-celled alga Oophila amblystomatis. The salamanders' viridescent eggs are coloured by...