David Prentice, professor of life sciences at Indiana State University and an adjunct professor of medical & molecular genetics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, explains why human embryonic stem-cell research is illegal, immoral, and unnecessary.
At press conferences today in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo, scientists will announce the completion of the Human Genome project. It is remarkable that, in less than a half century, we have gone from Crick and Watsons discovery of the structure of DNA to a basic map of our 100,000 human genes.
What is the position of the Catholic Church on organ donation for the purpose of transplant? What moral principles are involved? What would motivate one to be an organ donor?
While reading the newspaper in May 1999, I noticed a headline about an evolution controversy occupying the Kansas State Board of Education. I flipped the page without reading the story. Like many pro-life people, I felt that the origin of the species was a matter of God's choice of methods - but not a pro-life concern.
All human beings should "make the cut" simply because they are inviolate, unrepeatable, and irreplaceable human beings. The path to abortion and the road toward cloning is one that consistently and increasingly subordinates the primary good of the human being to some secondary good.
The individual who is a servant of technique, Jacques Ellul writes, must be completely unconscious of himself.
Bioethicists spend much of their time arguing with one another, beneathor, more accurately, abovethe public radar, in arcane academic journals, books, university symposia, and government-appointed commissions.
If we should not underestimate the significance of human cloning, neither should we exaggerate its imminence or misunderstand just what is involved.
Everyday we read and hear about the constant onslaught of controversial medical issues, e.g., euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, test-tube babies, cloning and stem cell research, creating monsters in the lab, etc. it is all coming down very fast and we will all have to make decisions about these and many other issues not even imagined yet in the 21st Century.
As a practitioner of a new medical specialty known as clinical ethics, Jonathan Moreno joins the burgeoning cadre of academics who are making the leap from the blackboard to the bedside.
