What the CBC Means to Me

by The Center for Bioethics and Culture

Dear Friend of the CBC, As you may know, I serve as chair of the board of directors of The CBC. During the day I practice general surgery in Manhattan . . . Kansas. We call ourselves the Little Apple. We even have a ball drop on New Year’s Eve. I have had the honor [...]

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The Coming Human Cloning Controversies

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by Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC

I learned about the first successful human cloning last Monday, but couldn’t write about it until Wednesday because of a news embargo. The peer reviewed paper in Cell was rushed to print because is a huge deal. But, much to my surprise, it only made mild news. There were two reasons for that I think. [...]

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Human Cloning Obfuscation 4

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The Los Angeles Times has waded in to the junk biology game, assuring us that no embryos are threatened in human cloning — WHEN THE WHOLE POINT OF HUMAN CLONING IS TO CREATE AN EMBRYO! From the editorial, “The Specter of Human Cloning:” The team at OHSU, which disclosed its work in a paper published [...]

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Human Cloning Obfuscation 3

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I now see that the old dishonest game is well afoot: Biotech types and media pretending that human cloning isn’t really human cloning unless a baby is born. The cloning breakthrough is instead being spun as skin cells into stem cells! As if it were induced pluripotent stem cells, which really do turn skin into [...]

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Cloning Obfuscation 2

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The junk biology is flying in the media’s descriptions of the now accomplished human cloning. This next example comes from the Wall Street Journal’s Gautam Naik. From the ridiculously titled, “Experiment Brings Human Cloning One Step Closer:” Scientists have used cloning technology to transform human skin cells into embryonic stem cells, an experiment that may [...]

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Let the Cloning Obfuscation Begin

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Now that human cloning is upon us, look for many scientists and their camp followers (or ignorant reporters) to mislead about what the technology entails. Human SCNT creates human embryos through asexual means. It does not create stem cells. To obtain cloned stem cells, the embryos have to be nurtured and maintained in a dish [...]

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Human Cloning is Here!

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The world just changed. An international consortium of scientists have announced that they have successfully cloned human beings using the process that led to Dolly the sheep. They were able to develop four cloned embryos in a dish to the “blastocyst” stage, the point in time when an embryo can be implanted in a uterus [...]

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Press Release: New Research Exploits Women and Commodifies Human Life

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE SAN RAMON, Calif. (May 15, 2013) – The Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC) strongly decries the practice of deriving human embryonic stem cells through cloning because it exploits women for their eggs, it commodifies human life, and it is unnecessary. In the June 6, 2013, issue of the scientific journal Cell, [...]

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“Assisted Dying” IS Assisted Suicide

I received a form letter the other day from Kathryn Tucker, of the euphemistically named “Compassion and Choices” (C & C), which came into being as part of a merger with the honestly named Hemlock Society. The letter referenced a law review article I wrote way back in 2007, which she claimed to have “enjoyed [...]

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Buying and Selling Human Embryos

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Methinks human cloning is drawing very near. Elsewhere, I point to growing evidence of this concern. An advocacy article in the New England Journal of Medicine — always on the radical side of bioethical issues — argues for permission to buy and sell “made to order” human embryos. From my piece: But designing the embryo [...]

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