As my Grandfather would have said, "Now, there's stem cells and there's stem cells...."

Real Clear Politics has an essay by Kathleen Parker regarding President Obama's recent "lifting" of the stem cell ban by the US Government. Here are a few pertinent excerpts:

Unfortunately, the stem cell debate has been characterized as a conflict between science (as though science is always right) and religious "kooks" (as though religious folk are never right). In choosing sides, it is, indeed, easier to imagine lunch with a researcher who wants to resurrect Christopher Reeve (whom Obama couldn't resist mentioning) and make him walk again, than with the corner protester holding a fetus in a jar. (Note: I don't believe I've ever heard of an abortion protester "holding a fetus in a jar".)

The insistence on using embryonic stem cells always rested on the argument that they were pluripotent, capable of becoming any kind of cell. That superior claim no longer can be made with the spectacular discovery in 2007 of "induced pluripotent stem cells" (iPS), which was the laboratory equivalent of the airplane. Very simply, iPS cells can be produced from a skin cell by injecting genes that force it to revert to its primitive "blank slate" form with all the same pluripotent capabilities of embryonic stem cells.

The iPS discovery even prompted Dr. Ian Wilmut, who cloned Dolly the sheep, to abandon his license to attempt human cloning, saying that the researchers "may have achieved what no politician could: an end to the embryonic stem cell debate." And, just several days ago, Dr. Bernadine Healy, director of the National Institutes of Health under the first President Bush, wrote in U.S. News & World Report that these recent developments "reinforced the notion that embryonic stem cells ... are obsolete."

Many scientists, of course, want to conduct embryonic stem cell research, as they have and always could with private funding. One may agree or disagree with their purposes, but one may also question why taxpayers should have to fund something so ethically charged when alternative methods are available.

Read the entire essay here.

New Natural Law Anthology Reviewed

MercatorNet today features a review of Contemporary Perspectives on Natural Law: Natural Law as a Limiting Concept, an anthology edited by Ana Marta Gonzalez. An extended quote from the review follows.

Natural law starts by assuming there is such a thing as human nature. This
insistence on a human nature is a limiting concept. It claims that true freedom
is only to be found in acceptance and respect of this human nature that we have
inherited, not created.

A recent book on the topic of natural law, which is a compilation of
papers from an international conference held in Spain in 2006, makes this point
clear. If you accept natural law, you accept that human nature exists and that
it is the same for all humans. This in turn implies that some actions that human
beings can perform are not good for them. It further implies that freedom is not
the goal of human existence but rather a faculty of choice which allows us to do
good actions and thus to flourish as human beings.

Contemporary Perspectives on Natural Law: Natural Law as a Limiting
Concept is a useful addition to contemporary debate, given that, despite its
pariah status in some universities, natural law ethics is still one of the great
traditions of ethical thinking and is given some time in most ethics courses,
even if this amounts to a dismissive nod.

Read the whole review here. Click the title of the book, above, for its listing on Amazon.