Bioethics

WHAT'S NOT IN A NAME is the question du jour at single-issue advocacy groups.

IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE there is proposed legislation sponsored by Sens. Orrin Hatch and Dianne Feinstein, S.303, titled "A bill to prohibit human cloning and protect stem cell research." Despite this label--and Sen. Arlen Specter's insistence that the bill would ban "all" human cloning--the legislation actually would ban the implantation of a cloned embryo into a uterus, while allowing human cloning for medical research.

THE WASHINGTON RUMOR MILL has it that the president's commission to consider bioethical issues such as, but not limited to, cloning, is about to issue its report on the possibility of creating a market for human organs. And the word is that the bioethicists have decided that it is a bad idea to allow donors to sell hearts, lungs, livers, and other vital organs to patients desperately in need of transplants.

A FEW DAYS AGO--the night of January 1, as it happens--British television's Channel 4 aired a program about art in China that featured photographs of performance artist Zhu Yu eating the corpse of a stillborn baby.

Other Chinese artists shown in the program painted dead Siamese twins with their blood and drank wine that had been used to preserve an amputated human penis. This caused, as you might expect, a certain amount of upset in the former home of the now, at last, completely deceased Queen Victoria.

SO THE RAELIANS, who maintain that human life was the product of cloning by space aliens, now claim that their for-profit corporation, Clonaid, has cloned the first human baby, a healthy female named Eve. There is no proof of any kind to verify this, and most of the world is highly skeptical. It took nearly 300 tries before Dolly the cloned sheep was born. While it is true that mammals like mice and cows are now cloned regularly, the failure rates in animal cloning remain very high, and efforts to clone a dog or monkey so far have failed.

The Democrats' Flag Fantasy

THE WAR ROOM LIVES! Within minutes of Trent Lott's statement that he was stepping down as majority leader, Democrats were repeating their headquarters-dictated talking points--make that talking point: The GOP is the party of the Old Confederacy.

Nancy Pelosi, top House Democrat, said: "The Republicans have repeatedly exploited the issue of race, as recently as the election in November in Georgia, where their successful campaigns for U.S. senator and governor centered on the Confederate flag."

A letter from John Conyers Jr.

TRUTH, famously the first casualty of war, is now falling victim to the latest skirmish in the biotech wars. Euphemism and doublespeak are the order of the day, and not because of timid politicians or shameless propagandists, but, shockingly, because of the eagerness of a leading university to embark on human cloning research.

Earlier this week, Stanford University announced the creation of a $12 million research center that would, among other things, produce cloned human embryos for biomedical research.

THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.

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Beth Henary's Things Go Right in Texas does a great job of capturing what happened here in Texas during the 2002 election. As for that "latent Democratic base" of voters, I think they may be in more trouble than just having lost all the state wide races, and control of the legislature.

WE TEND TO ASSUME that science involves demystification: Rainbows are not a sign of God's covenant with man, science tells us, but simply sunlight refracted through the prism of water vapor; thunderbolts are not products of the wrath of Zeus, but of electrical charges in the atmosphere--you get the idea. But what's striking is how often modern science actually increases our sense of awe at the ineffable mysteries of the universe.

Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity
The Challenge for Bioethics
by Leon R. Kass
Encounter, 313 pp., $26.95

WE LIVE in a very rich country (in case you hadn't noticed), and from the heaping surplus of our prosperity we have carved a number of professions that--to put it as kindly as possible--are not completely, vitally necessary.

WHEN MAO ZEDONG set forth his designs for China's Great Leap Forward into Communist modernity, he described the Chinese people as "poor and blank." "On blank sheets of paper," he declared, "free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written, the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted." Possessed by the totalitarian dream of human nature as his open canvas, Mao thought a new sort of man could be written into being, and that brutal means for creating the new society would be justified.

Today, China stands on the threshold of another revolution--the biot

SOMETHING DISTURBING is happening in the Florida elections this fall. No, not the chance that Janet Reno will be the Democratic candidate for governor. A state initiative has qualified for the ballot letting voters decide whether to grant constitutional rights to pregnant pigs.

On the surface, the issue is one of animal husbandry. In the interest of industrial efficiency, and to prevent mother pigs from accidentally rolling on and crushing their offspring, many pig farmers confine pregnant sows in "farrowing crates" during the final stage of pregnancy and for a time after birth.