Saturday, June 09, 2018

One of History's Most Powerful Commentary

Proof that the pen can be mightier than an atom bomb:

From:

Lines should be drawn on stem cell research
by Charles Krauthammer:

Last week, the White House invited me to a signing ceremony overturning former President George W. Bush's executive order on stem cell research. I assume this was because I have long argued in these columns and during my five years on the President's Council on Bioethics that, contrary to the Bush policy, federal funding should be extended to research on embryonic stem cell lines derived from discarded embryos in fertility clinics.

I declined to attend. Once you show your face at these things you become a tacit endorser of whatever they spring. My caution was vindicated.

Bush had restricted federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to cells derived from embryos that had already been destroyed (as of his speech of Aug. 9, 2001). While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, President Barack Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned — and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived — human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts.

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science, and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research — a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.

On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of "science" and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.

That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy. The other part — the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on "restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making" — would have made me walk out...

 BOOM!

Related:

Charles Krauthammer (/ˈkraʊt.hæmər//ˈkraʊt.hæmər//; born March 13, 1950) is an American syndicated columnist, author, political commentator, and former physician whose weekly column was syndicated to more than 400 publications worldwide.[1] In August 2017, he stopped writing his column and being a commentator on Fox News, due to his battle with cancer.

While in his first year studying at Harvard Medical School, Krauthammer became permanently paralyzed from the neck down after a diving board accident that severed his spinal cord at C5...

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