Wesley J. Smith

I don’t like to comment about issues involving individual family matters, but this is an exception: Alaska Governor Sara Palin and her husband have welcomed a new baby with Down syndrome into the world. From the story:The doctor’s announcement in December, when Palin was four months . . . . Continue Reading »

Back during the Clinton Administration, federal bureaucrats launched a devastating assault on hospice—called “Operation Restore Trust”—in which the Feds presumed that a patient who did not die within 6 months of entering hospice was there fraudulently, and as a consequence, . . . . Continue Reading »

As promised, I have written a longer piece Switzerland embodying the “dignity” of plants into its constitution in a published in this week’s Weekly Standard (subscription may be required). First, I recount the story and the ethics committee’s report, as I did here at SHS . . . . Continue Reading »

Well, this is long overdue. Congress overwhelmingly passed, and the president will sign, a bill outlawing genetic discrimination in employment and insurance. From the story:The bill passed with overwhelming support in the House on a 414-1 vote, a week after being approved by a 95-0 vote in the . . . . Continue Reading »

The power of the IPSCs is becoming so evident that, like Ian Wilmut before them, many scientists are joining the field. From a story in Nature Reports Stem Cells: The fact that making iPS cells does not pose the technical and ethical challenges of working with eggs or embryos is drawing large . . . . Continue Reading »

The terrorist pimp Jerry Vlasak, reacting to a judge’s refusal to lift a restraining order against ALF and others who have made the lives of UCLA animal researchers a living hell through threats of death, bombs left on doorsteps, etc., has issued a clear threat of violence that is barely even . . . . Continue Reading »

There is a huge lesson to be learned in this story, but we won’t learn it and the media won’t highlight the issue—lest we come to the “wrong conclusion” about Terri Schiavo. Haleigh Poutre, who doctors swore would never recover, and state bureaucrats consigned to . . . . Continue Reading »

I would be more comfortable about this tremendous potential advance in healing serious wounds if it were reported in a peer reviewed medical journal rather than the sensationalistic Daily “Halle Berry Shows She’s a REAL Mom as Dress Reveals Post Baby Tummy” Mail, but the story . . . . Continue Reading »

Why humans have nothing to do with the threatened extinction of a certain sub-subspecies of . . . . Continue Reading »

Research on the new Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells continues to advance. Now, scientists have morphed them into heart and blood cells. From the story:Stem cell researchers at UCLA were able to grow functioning cardiac cells using mouse skin cells that had been reprogrammed into cells with the same . . . . Continue Reading »