“The decision to have children has always struck me as an essentially selfish one: You choose, out of a desire for fulfillment or self-betterment or curiosity or boredom or baby-mania or peer pressure, to bring a new human into this world. And it has never seemed more selfish than today. From a ... Continue reading
Turning lead into gold
I started college as a philosophy major. While my friends were agonizing their way through calculus and organic chemistry, I was happily holed up in the library stacks with musty volumes by Nietzsche, Socrates, Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz, et. al., or in the Student Union having deep conversations ... Continue reading
Confessing our national guilt
May 26 is National Sorry Day in Australia, a national attempt to heal the wounds of the century-long practice of forcibly removing mixed-race children from their Aboriginal mothers. This government policy, which was carried out for about 100 years from 1860 to modern times, is known to have ... Continue reading
William Saletan on the stem cell debate
Slate Magazine's William Saletan made an apt and useful comparison between the debate about embryonic stem cell research and the use of water boarding in CIA interrogations: "On Monday, President Obama lifted the ban on federal funding of stem-cell research using destroyed human embryos. If you ... Continue reading
What are you worth?
$7.22 million — that's the value of the average, generic American, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Not too shabby, I say, except that the agency has just cut its previous estimate, which used to be about $800,000 higher.Should I feel insulted?Maybe not. The EPA is ... Continue reading
Candidates speak out on waterboarding
As we approach the primaries, many voters are interested in the candidates' positions on the controversial subject of waterboarding. As a public service, I am providing the following quotations:Rudy Giuliani on waterboarding: I'm in the same position now that I was 12 years ago when I ran for ... Continue reading
The world has changed
The world has changed. It is the beginning of the end of the controversy that has surrounded this field. Over time, these [induced] cells will be used in more and more labs. And human embryo stem cell research will be abandoned by more and more labs. — James Thomson, University of Wisconsin ... Continue reading