The President Politicizes Stem-Cell Research
Taxpayers have a right to be left out of it.
Posted: Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Yesterday President Barack Obama issued an executive order that authorizes expanded federal funding for research using stem cells produced by destroying human embryos. The announcement was classic Obama: advancing radical policies while seeming calm and moderate, and preaching the gospel of civility while accusing those who disagree with the policies of being "divisive" and even "politicizing science."  [Full Story]

For the Love of the Game
Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, the Mitchell Report, and the adulteration of American sports.
Posted: Tuesday, March 11, 2008
While the Mitchell Report about steroids in major-league baseball gives voice to a widespread concern about the disturbing effects of performance-enhancing drugs on modern athletics, it also demonstrates our inability (or unwillingness) to confront the deeper sources of the trouble. We seem to know that biotechnological enhancement is a threat to the "integrity of the game," but we cannot really articulate why. The reason is that we have lost an understanding of what makes sports truly admirable, and hence worthy of our attention and our devotion.  [Full Story]

The Ends of Science

Posted: Friday, May 11, 2007
Faced with the contingencies of nature and history, perhaps we need to regain the kind of equanimity that faith often inspires. Faced with a world that so often seems absurd, perhaps we should not place all our hopes in science alone. In our hunger for still waters, nature offers no proof that man's redemptive hopes are justified, but also no proof that everything is hopeless.  [Full Story]

Unthinkable Thoughts
A strategist asks, Where is technology leading us?
Posted: Friday, February 23, 2007
Fear and trembling about the dark side of modern technology have been with us for centuries--from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World to J. Robert Oppenheimer's atomic remorse. Fred Iklé's new book, Annihilation from Within is a sobering exploration of the perils of progress.  [Full Story]

Health Care in Three Acts

Posted: Monday, January 22, 2007
Americans say they are very worried about health care -- but what exactly are they worried about? Untangling that question is harder than it looks. It is difficult to speak of health care as a single coherent challenge, let alone to propose a single workable solution. In fact, American health care faces three fairly distinct predicaments, affecting three fairly distinct portions of the population—the poor, the middle class, and the elderly—and each of them calls for a distinct approach.  [Full Story]

In Whose Image Shall We Die?

Posted: Monday, January 1, 2007
The problem of living well with death is central to many of the quandaries of bioethics, from assisted suicide to organ transplants to embryo research. In confronting these very modern medical dilemmas, we need to recover some ancient wisdom about mortality. By considering some of our culture’s paradigmatic images of the good death—the remembered death of Jacob, the tranquil death of Socrates, the redeemed death of Christ, the opposed death of Franklin, and the crisis of death in Camus’s myth of Sisyphus—Eric Cohen seeks lessons for living well and dying well.  [Full Story]

The Human Difference

Posted: Wednesday, December 6, 2006
In the contest for oddest pronouncement in a State of the Union address, high marks should go to President Bush's call last January for a national ban on "creating human-animal hybrids." Yet the President's call to action did not come out of nowhere. If it seemed strange, that is only because we live in genuinely strange times.  [Full Story]

A Clarifying Five Years
Stem-cell politics under a microscope.
Posted: Wednesday, August 9, 2006
During the recent congressional debates on stem-cell legislation, a small group in the House of Representatives worked hard to kill a bill that had passed the Senate unanimously. What exactly were these members voting against when they chose to stop the Specter-Santorum bill? They voted against helping American scientists find ways to obtain the benefits of embryonic-stem-cell research and so-called "therapeutic cloning" without the moral hazards and political controversy. They voted against finding common ground.  [Full Story]

Stem the Tide
What Congress should -- and shouldn't -- do.
Posted: Friday, July 14, 2006
This week, the Senate will take up legislation already passed by the House (H.R. 810) to authorize federal funding for research on embryonic stem cells harvested by destroying human embryos left over in fertility clinics. Since August 2001, under a policy established by President Bush, federally funded research has been limited to embryonic stem cell lines that already existed. If the bill passes, the president will veto it.   [Full Story]

Stem Cells Without Moral Corruption
Congress Can Give Research a Boost Without Supporting the Misuse of Human Embryos.
Posted: Thursday, July 6, 2006
Cloning will always be morally corrupt because it requires deliberately creating and destroying thousands of human embryos. At the same time, the current effort in Congress to expand federal funding of embryonic stem cell research to include embryos left over in fertility clinics will never satisfy the scientists, because such stem cells will not give them the genetic control they want over the cells. The real opportunity now before us is to find a scientific alternative to research cloning, one that gives us the stem cells we desire without the ethical violations we abhor.  [Full Story]