Wesley J. Smith

An ad on Craigslist offers to euthanize pets at a discount, upsetting animal lovers. From the story: The person who posted the ad on Craigslist said he or she has a “military background” and is “very good at what I do. All work is carried out at my private home in Federal . . . . Continue Reading »

What this has to do with me, I don’t understand:Bad pun, good point:HT: Miguel . . . . Continue Reading »

The NEJM has an editorial out in which it claims to tackle the three “inconvenient truths” about health care. From the editorial: 1. Over the past 30 years, U.S. health care expenditures have grown 2.8% per annum faster, on average, than the rest of the economy. If this differential . . . . Continue Reading »

Here’s an exciting animal experiment. Scientists found an adult prostate stem cell in mice and one cell grew an entire new prostate gland. From the story. Here we identify CD117 (c-kit, stem cell factor receptor) as a new marker of a rare adult mouse PSC population, and demonstrate that a . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the disturbing areas of biotechnology that deserves more scrutiny than it has heretofore received is the “savior sibling” concept. A savior sibling is created via IVF and tested prior to implantation to match the DNA of a born child with a disease that could benefit from tissue . . . . Continue Reading »

This is just unbelievable, or better stated given the UK’s history in this field, it is all too believable. At the last minute, the Parliament in the UK added a provision to its omnibus embryo bill—that among other things permits human/animal hybrid cloned embryos to be . . . . Continue Reading »

An article in Our Sunday Visitor, a Catholic publication, warns readers about the dangers of radical environmentalism and animal rights—epitomized by Spain’s pending enactment of the Great Ape Project and Ecuador’s granting rights to “nature” in its new Constitution. . . . . Continue Reading »

Some more observant SHSers may notice that I changed the descriptive blurb of this blog from, “Your 24/7 bioethics seminar,” to “Your 24/7 seminar on bioethics and the importance of being human.” It’s not quite as pithy, but we do deal with issues that extend beyond the . . . . Continue Reading »

I have always said that if you want to see why things seem to be going so wrong in bioethics, just look at the professional literature at the most elite levels, in which a more candid view is presented than may appear in popular media. The bioethics blogs can also be illuminating.Case in point, a . . . . Continue Reading »

Al Martinez, an LA Times columnist (the newspaper that declared “nature rights” in Ecuador to be “intriguing), has caught up with the plants rights movement. In “Getting an Earful From Your Veggies,” he writes: It is not enough to worry about the economy, the political . . . . Continue Reading »