Playing God with the Human Race By John Stonestreet with G. Shane Morris Orson Scott Card’s science fiction novel, “Ender’s Shadow” is a favorite of some of our staff. In it, a twelve-year-old’s medical condition gives him superhuman brilliance. Only after helping mankind win the war against an insectoid alien invader does Julian Delphiki discover …
Continue reading "When Genetically Modified Children Have Children"Another Day, Another Euphemism: Abortion Lobby Argues Against Bill that Protects Babies from Genetic Discrimination Editor’s note. The following was blogged in real time by Ohio Right to Life yesterday during testimony on the Down Syndrome Non-Discrimination Act. On Wednesday, the Ohio House Health Committee heard opponent testimony against our Down Syndrome Non-Discrimination Act. NARAL …
Continue reading "Abortion Lobby Argues Against Bill that Protects Babies from Genetic Discrimination"A new film about Jerome Lejeune shows the drama of his life after identifying the cause of Down syndrome. By Mary Le Rumeur It is August 1969 in San Francisco and Professor Jerome Lejeune is addressing the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics. Ten years earlier he had discovered the genetic cause …
Continue reading "‘To kill or not to kill, that is the question’"By Michael Cook “Europe’s superlab,” a £700 million research institute, the Francis Crick Institute, opens this year. It is Europe’s largest biomedical research centre, a partnership between six of the UK’s best known scientific and academic organizations – the [U.K.] government funded Medical Research Council (MRC), Cancer Research UK (CRUK), the Wellcome Trust, UCL (University …
Continue reading "The company they keep"By Wesley J. Smith A Ph.D. in genetics named Ricki Lewis uses a “DNA science” blog to ask a cogent question: “When Does A Human Life Begin?” She then presents 17 potential time points, from sperm and egg through the old joke, “acceptance into medical school.” Two warrant quoting. From the piece: “3. Of the …
Continue reading "Human Life Does Not “Begin” at 22 Weeks"By Dave Andrusko We’ve written two stories about a very important topic—a new noninvasive procedure that may allow women someday to test their unborn babies for more than 3,500 genetic disorders. Needless to add, there are ethical concerns galore in opening this “Pandora’s Box,” as NPR’s Rob Stein described it. The research, published in the …
Continue reading "New Test opens “Pandora’s Box”"By Dave Andrusko “What if you could read much of your child’s medical future while it was still in the womb? Taking a major step toward that goal, one fraught with therapeutic potential and ethical questions, scientists have now accurately predicted almost the whole genome of an unborn child by sequencing DNA from the mother’s …
Continue reading "New non-invasive pre-natal test raises enormous ethical issues"