October 2007

Cord Blood Stem Cells

Banking on Your Future, a guest commentary by Dr. Peter Hollands Hardly a day goes by without a new revelation in stem cell technology. When I first worked in this field nearly 30 years ago there was little interest in stem cells beyond the highly specialized experts working on bone marrow transplantation. Today we hear [...]

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Banking on Your Future

Hardly a day goes by without a new revelation in stem cell technology. When I first worked in this field nearly 30 years ago there was little interest in stem cells beyond the highly specialized experts working on bone marrow transplantation. Today we hear about stem cells coming from cord blood, placenta, embryos, the fat [...]

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Nascent stem cell company raises ethical and medical issues

There is a very good piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today discussing the questionable business of starting new companies to provide banking services to people wanting to store the stem cells from their ‘leftover’ embryos. The piece is rich with quotes which you typically hear coming out of the mouths of embryo stem cell [...]

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2008 Paul Ramsey Award Winner

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D., chair of the Paul Ramsey nominating committee and CBC Director said, “No one is more deserving of the Ramsey Award than Fr. Albert S. Moraczewski, O.P. A priest, scientist, ethicist, researcher, administrator, and spokesman for Catholic bioethics, Father Albert has spent his entire adult life thinking and writing about the nexus [...]

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Happy Cows Come from California

So the commercial says, but today’s news says that Happy Scientist don’t come from California but Wisconsin. Alta Charo, professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who spent last year as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley (Go Bears!) stated, “Sometimes it’s good to be small, small enough to [...]

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Raw Materials

When, if ever before now, has humanity technologically progressed with such leaps and bounds, yet with less attention to the driving forces and philosophical assumptions that pave the road we follow? In the face of cavalier ‘progress,’ our culture has exhibited technological tunnel-vision—it’s all too easy to stand in awe, uncritical and approving, of the [...]

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2008 Paul Ramsey Award Winner

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D., chair of the Paul Ramsey nominating committee and CBC Director said, ‘No one is more deserving of the Ramsey Award than Fr. Albert S. Moraczewski, O.P. A priest, scientist, ethicist, researcher, administrator, and spokesman for Catholic bioethics, Father Albert has spent his entire adult life thinking and writing about the nexus [...]

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A Cold Day In History

All this controversy surrounding James Watson’s latest comments has dredged up the dirty little secret about our past eugenics movement. The news is buzzing with titles like “Never Again: The history of American eugenics explored online” If you have never visited the Eugenics Archive website from Cold Spring Harbor, I highly recommend spending some time [...]

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Watson Suffers from Foot in Mouth Disease *Again*

James Watson, the other half of “Watson and Crick”, is famous for his outlandish comments about the human race. Well he’s at it again. Touring London, promoting his new book, he was set to speak at London’s Science Museum, and then he said this. “Black people are less intelligent than white people.” And this. “People [...]

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Can I Donate??

Have you heard the news!! “Accident victims could one day have their severed nerves “rewired” with the help of stem cells extracted by liposuction.” Researchers have been able to take animal fat cells and change them into nerve cells which can be used to rewire damaged cells. It has been successful to date in animals, [...]

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