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It's uncertain whether egg cells can likewise be created from male human skin cells, but scientists are already attempting to achieve this, so that two men could genetically create a child, for instance. (LifeSiteNews) – Scientists in Japan have successfully bred a mouse with two genetic fathers by turning a male skin cell into an egg cell, raising ethical concerns regarding the technique’s potential use on humans. Katsuhiko Hayashi, a biologist at the University of Osaka, announced last week that his team had helped conceive seven “healthy” mice pups using two genetic “fathers” in each case, marking the “first case...

When activists successfully legalized assisted suicide in California, they persuaded the California Medical Association to shift from opposition to neutrality with the promise that no doctor would be forced to participate. But here’s the thing with assisted suicide: Such promises are made to be broken. Now that assisted suicide is well-ensconced in California culture, a bill has been filed that would destroy medical conscience for doctors who oppose assisted suicide. From SB 380 (new text in italics): (3) If a health care provider is unable or unwilling to carry out a qualified individual’s request under this part and the qualified...

Bioethicist Jacob Appel can be relied on to promote the most radical bioethics agendas, assisted suicide for the mentally ill, fetal farming, you name it.  And now he has argued that if Montana affirms a constitutional right to assisted suicide in Montana, the state has a duty to make sure that doctors are willing to do the deed.  Why?  Doctors have a monopoly on a limited commodity–the practice of medicine–and hence they should be able to be forced to participate in the taking of patients’ lives in assisted suicide. From his column: However, it [medical license and professional autonomy]...

The promoters of embryonic stem cell enterprises continue to tout soon to come “breakthroughs” accompanied by supine media coverage and inaccurate statements by “the scientists” who twist and distort scientific definitions to win a political debate. Such spin in the name of science, actually corrupts science. Latest example: Another company is claiming that “next year” it will start human ESC trials. From a column by Orange County Register “biomedical innovation” columnist Colin Stewart, who has apparently drunk the Kool-Aid. First there is his cruelly hyped headline: “ALS patients could get help from stem cells next year:” From his column:...

IT HAS BEEN REPEATED so often that it is now a mantra: "Embryonic stem cells offer the most promise for finding cures" for degenerative diseases and conditions such as Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injury. But saying something ten thousand times doesn't make it true. Indeed, the embryonic stem cell mantra has yet to be demonstrated scientifically. More than that, the actual data published to date in peer-reviewed science journals tell a far different story. While there have certainly been successes in embryonic stem cell experiments in animal studies--many of them hyped to the hilt in mainstream media reports--the numbers...

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide. His latest book is Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World. I think Bobby Schindler is right.There have been a lot of stories of late about how supposedly vegetative patients could understand, or of "miraculous" awakenings by people who doctors were sure would never react consciously again. Bobby, Terri Schiavo's brother, has noticed that whatever the condition of the patient whose story is being told, the reports all have a common sub theme--the awakening, comprehension,...

Should laws against assisted suicide be rescinded as "paternalistic?" Should assisted suicide be transformed from what is now a crime (in most places) into a sacred "right to die"? Should assisted suicide be redefined from a form of homicide into a legitimate "medical treatment" readily available to all persistently suffering people, including to the mentally ill?   According to Brown University professor Jacob M. Appel, the answer to all three of these questions is an unequivocal yes. Writing in the May-June 2007 Hastings Center Report ("A Suicide Right for the Mentally Ill?"), Appel argues in that assisted suicide should not only...

LifeNews Note: Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture. His next book, to be published in the fall, is Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World.Once again the media are trumpeting the call among many in Congress, pushed by millions in Big Biotech lobbying money, for President Bush to reverse his decision to limit federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research (ESCR) to those lines already in existence on August 9, 2001. Fronted this time by the grief-stricken Nancy Reagan, and boosted by Hollywood celebrities such as...

Paraplegic breakthrough using adult stem cells Apparent major breakthrough with patient paralyzed 19 years Posted: September 28, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com In an apparent major breakthrough, scientists in Korea report using umbilical cord blood stem cells to restore feeling and mobility to a spinal-cord injury patient. The research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Cythotherapy, centered on a woman who had been a paraplegic 19 years due to an accident. After an infusion of umbilical cord blood stem cells, stunning results were recorded: "The patient could move her hips and feel her hip skin on day 15 after...

The right-to-die movement abandons pretense.   There is a pretense in contemporary assisted suicide advocacy that goes something like this: "Aid in dying" (as it is euphemistically called) is merely to be a safety valve, a last resort only available to imminently dying patients for whom nothing else can be done to alleviate      suffering.   Meanwhile, in the real world, the founder of the Swiss suicide facilitating organization Dignitas is just about done with pretense. The Sunday Times Magazine (London) reported that Dignitas' founder, Ludwig Minelli, plans to create sort of a Starbucks for suicide: a chain of death centers "to end...

AT LAST A HIGH GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL in Europe got up the nerve to chastise the Dutch government for preparing to legalize infant euthanasia. Italy's Parliamentary Affairs minister, Carlo Giovanardi, said during a radio debate: "Nazi legislation and Hitler's ideas are reemerging in Europe via Dutch euthanasia laws and the debate on how to kill ill children." Unsurprisingly, the Dutch, ever prickly about international criticism of their peculiar institution, were outraged. Giovanardi's critique cut so deeply that even Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende felt the need to respond, sniffing, "This [Giovanardi's assertion] is scandalous and unacceptable. This is not the...

Forget the old stem-cell research debate--laws in New Jersey, Illinois, Delaware, and California have moved the goal posts into brave new territory.EVER SINCE President Bush limited federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research to existing cell lines, the mainstream media has obsessed about the perpetual political campaign to overturn his policy. But this is a mere dustup, a tempest in a teapot compared to the far more consequential story begging to be told of the radical and ambitious political agenda being pursued furiously by Big Biotech at the state level. Back in those quaint old days of 2001, biotechnologists told us...

In February 2004, Woo--Suk Hwang made world headlines when he claimed to have cloned human embryos using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, and then to have derived a line of stem cells from the embryos that could be used for medical research. Enthusiasm for this first "successful" experiment in human cloning, published in the prestigious peer--reviewed journal Science, was tempered by the inefficiency of the process: It took 242 human eggs to get just one embryonic stem cell line.That problem seemed solved when, last May, Hwang published another article in Science asserting that he had again successfully...

. . . about adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells? Probably not.WE HAVE HEARD IT STATED SO OFTEN it has become a media mantra: Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) offer the greatest hope for cures; adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells have far less potential; the Bush administration's embryonic stem cell funding restrictions have caused America to fall behind in the great international race to develop effective ESC treatments. Baloney, baloney, and pure baloney: The problems with harnessing embryonic stem cells as treatments appear to be growing, not shrinking. For example, ESC boosters used to claim that these cells are "immortal,"...

Adult Stem Cell Research Treats Spinal Cord Injury Patient   LifeNews.com Note: Award winning author Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture. An attorney, Smith's new book Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World was published last year. I have known about this for some time, but because I didn't want to be guilty of the same hyping that is so often engaged in by some therapeutic cloning proponents, I waited until it was published in a peer reviewed journal.Now it has been and the...

California’s Proposition 71, a $3 billion initiative to fund stem cell research, is a bad idea for a state currently in a budget crisis, says Wesley J. Smith of the Weekly Standard. Additionally, the initiative is fuzzy with few checks and balances. For one thing, the $3 billion would have to be borrowed, adding another $3 billion in interest onto its price tag. Moreover, the bill is simply vague and controversial, says Smith: Prop 71 is not merely a law to permit stem cell research, but a constitutional right to human cloning, meaning any changes to its terms and conditions...

The new grim reapers Practitioners of bioethics say who should live -- and who should die by Wesley J. Smith Sunday, June 9, 2002 ©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Is all human cloning wrong? Should doctors be allowed to kill people in permanent comas and harvest their organs? Would it be moral to deny expensive medical procedures to the seriously ill and disabled in order to provide health coverage for the uninsured? Do elderly people have a duty to die to spare their families and communities the financial and emotional costs of their care? These and even more provocative questions are...

My debate about Terri Schiavo’s case with Florida bioethicist Bill Allen on Court TV Online eventually got down to the nitty-gritty: Wesley Smith: "Bill, do you think Terri is a person?" Bill Allen: "No, I do not. I think having awareness is an essential criterion for personhood. Even minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood, but I don't think complete absence of awareness does." If you want to know how it became acceptable to remove tube-supplied food and water from people with profound cognitive disabilities, this exchange brings you to the nub of the Schiavo case — the “first...

Ian Wilmut: Human ClonerHow the man who created Dolly the sheep slid down the slippery slope to human reproductive cloning.by Wesley J. Smith IAN WILMUT, the co-creator of Dolly the Sheep, now intends to clone human life. This is quite a shift for Wilmut. When he and Keith Campbell entered the science pantheon with their announcement of the birth of Dolly, they forced the world to grapple with the question of whether it is moral to clone human life. But Wilmut claimed not to be interested in cloning humans. As described in his book, The Second Creation: Dolly and...

For more than ten years, conscious and unconscious cognitively disabled people who use feeding tubes have been legally dehydrated to death in the United States. This intentional life-ending act-clamping feeding tubes and denying all sustenance-has become so ubiquitous that, generally, little attention is paid. This public indifference was shattered by the Terri Schiavo litigation, an epic legal, political, and media struggle that pitted Terri's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, against her quasi-estranged husband, Michael Schiavo. At stake was whether Terri would live, as fervently desired by her parents, or die by dehydration as demanded by her husband. (I shall explain...