Wesley J. Smith

Take this story with a huge grain of salt: Apparently a professor has warned that due to transhumanist-like modifications and eugenic mating decisions (my words), the human race will split into two branches, one beautiful, intelligent, and lithe, the other ugly, short, and brutish. From the story in . . . . Continue Reading »

“The scientists,” by which I mean the politicized advocates for a financial and ethical blank check in human cloning, genetic engineering, and other awesomely powerful biotechnologies, are upset. The poor babies are grousing about the potential for government regulation—in the UK . . . . Continue Reading »

Alta Charo is a wild booster of ESCR and human cloning research. We have gotten along fine when I have debated her, even when she accused me in a luncheon keynote address at last year’s Albany bioethics conference of being a part of the forces that are threatening an “endarkenment” . . . . Continue Reading »

In “The Eugenics Temptation,” Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson hits some nails on the head about the odious James Watson and the new eugenics. He surveys some of the obnoxious, racist, and anti-disabled statements Watson has made over the years, and then connects some dots. (He . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the exceptional attributes of the human race—unknown in any other species in the universe—is the importance we place on our personal and family histories. No other species worries about who grandma was or the circumstances that led to their birth.I learned first hand the emotional . . . . Continue Reading »

Readers of SHS may recall several months ago I posted on a thwarted dehydration in which doctors and a seriously injured wife had agreed to dehydrate Jesse Ramirez to death because doctors believed he would never gain consciousness. Thank goodness, Ramirez’s parents fought the . . . . Continue Reading »

Thousand-Hand Bodhisattva MasterpieceThis troop of Chinese dancers is made up of deaf artists. It is quite exquisite. Check it . . . . Continue Reading »

The Not Dead Yet blog has a post up, byline Stephen Drake, castigating an opinion column published in the Hasting Center Report, byline bioethics consultant Anita J. Tarzian (no link available), that validates all of the worries the disability rights community has about the bioethics movement. The . . . . Continue Reading »

Cold Spring Harbor, the very name should bring chills. It was the home of the notorious Eugenics Record Office, operated for decades in the early 20th Century by the world’s most influential eugenicist Charles Davenport—one of the great villains in American history—through whose . . . . Continue Reading »

I’ve known this was coming for a long time—a lawsuit in Montana demanding a state constitutional right to assisted suicide. In fact, I predicted it back in 2000 when I wrote in the Weekly Standard:James H. Armstrong, M.D. v. The State of Montana should have been merely a skirmish in the . . . . Continue Reading »