New Scientist has some intriguing recent stories on particular fronts of research, including a discussion of the search for so-called ‘shadow life‘ — meaning, essentially,…
When I was growing up, my family would occasionally get a piece of junk mail inviting us to send off fifty bucks or so for…
In an insightful essay (published in an excellent anthology edited by Martha Nussbaum and Cass Sunstein, which also includes other sources cited in this series…
On 9 March, President Obama issued an executive order to lift hobbling restrictions on embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, George Bush. In…
Two years before Obama’s executive order to rescind limits on stem cell research, Senator Orrin Hatch introduced bill S.812, the ‘Human Cloning Ban and Stem…
The trouble started back in December 2002, when the BBC aired a documentary film that openly probed the tenets of a popular sect. The day…
The same winter that saw controversy over the BBC documentary on Crispian Hollis’s sect, another claim was foisted on the world by another sect, who…
Let’s start with the worn chestnut of identity. Ethicist Robert Williamson has posited ‘that there is a personal right, ethically based, to individuality, autonomy, and…
But in assessing the fear that cloning will lead to eugenics, note that human mate choice is already eugenic. Lest you doubt, take an extreme…
Reproductive cloning seems unlikely to spread quickly, of course. Costly services serve mainly rich folks, after all — and rich folks are rare (plus, sex…