>The title throws you for a loop, doesn’t it? Trust me to do what? Follow the law, when I can violate my own conscience? Practice ethical medicine when I promise not to have any personal convictions to guide me? What are laws and ethics to a person who has no conscience? This month’s American Journal … Continue reading
>I’ve learned two new words in the last two days: eponymous (“self-named” or named after the thing itself) and “corrigendum” (a correction of an error found after printing, which is corrected with a separate printed page.) I just had to use the latter in my title. The journal Nature has retracted (sorry, subscription only) a … Continue reading
>It’s all over the web (here and here, at the “news@nature.com” site,for instance), three separate labs have been able to reproduce embryonic stem cells by “reprogramming” adult cells from skin. Much of the commentary is like Art Caplan’s comments quoted in the first (Blog.bioethics.net) link above. Paraphrased, the bulk of the “mainstream remarks include, “It’s … Continue reading
>Kelly Hillis, over at the Bioethics.net blog scoffs at the opinion of Concerned Women of America on same sex parenting. She claims that “Science has allowed us to change the rules of biology, and DNA is becoming a tool, not a definition.” I strongly disagree. We can’t “change the rules of biology.” With quite a … Continue reading
Thank you, Wall Street Journal, for giving us this free article on dealing with a dying family member, focusing on children who live out of town. The best point: “Just go.” You won’t regret it. Edited 3/27/2102 for formatting
There’s still no evidence that Plan B interferes with implantation, and lots of evidence that it doesn’t. There have been reports that Drs. Mikolajczyk and Stanford (“Levonorgestrel emergency contraception: a joint analysis of effectiveness and mechanism of action.” Fertility and Sterility R. Mikolajczyk, J. Stanford, access to free abstract available, here) have proven that there … Continue reading
I haven’t been blogging – I’ve been lobbying and working, instead. Whether in Austin or at work, my access to the blog is spotty. And I worried that anything I wrote might get in the way of some bills we were fighting for. Unfortunately, the Texas legislature is self-destructing and virtually none of the pro-life, … Continue reading
Once again, ACT is hyping research that duplicates work already done using non-embryonic stem cell research. The only thing new is the possibility that they have come up with a way to make “Billions” of the plastic cells. Ok, maybe we learned something from Advanced Cell Technology’s Robert Lanza’s latest human embryonic stem cell report … Continue reading
Here’s more from The Lancet, an editorial comment discussing why the World Health Organization’s opinions matter at all. Just last week, I had to answer a pro-abortion argument that had used WHO statistics on abortion, the safety of abortion contrasted with carrying a pregnancy to birth (and delivery of a live child) in relation to … Continue reading
I fixed a broken link in that story about Nature Neuroscience’s refusal to allow dissent on its editorial pages, or even a rebuttal when the editors attack a scientist for expressing her opinion in another journal. (It seems that extraneous commas interfere with html.) If you follow the (functioning) link, there are links to all … Continue reading