Scientists Planning to Make New Form of Life
By Justin Gillis
“Scientists in Rockville are to announce this morning that they plan to create a new form of life in a laboratory dish, a project that raises ethical and safety issues but also promises to illuminate the fundamental mechanics of living organisms.”
This article by Charles Krauthammer is valuable not for Krauthammer's support for an attack on Iraq (which I oppose) but with the journalistic games the New York Times is playing in its campaign against the invasion of Iraq. The NYT is an opinionated paper, and this is a good case-study in how it has been going about influencing public opinion not just with editorials (which are a great addition to a paper) but by selectively shading and presenting the facts (which is incompatible with freedom).
As a proud native of Chicago and current resident of Pittsburgh, I hardly qualify as a redneck, and I’m quite the Yankee as far as my life goes. Nonetheless, there is much to respect in Southern culture (I hope it doesn’t get wholly assimilated in the near future), and I do not like this new CBS project to create a “reality” TV version of the Beverly Hillbillies. Yep, pull up a redneck, multi-generational family from its home in Appalachia or the South, and then set them up for a year in Beverly Hills with plenty of funds.
Now, before we commence this new voyeuristic feast, please read the August 30, 2002 entry of Dave Kreitman’s blog and Rob Dreher’s National Review op-ed on this subject.
This manipulative exercise in television seems engineered for the public to get its jollies in mocking a people without feeling dirty–after all, if hillbillies are ignorant and bigoted, aren’t we justified in hating them? I remember hearing a guy in junior high talking about throwing pennies at child beggars in Mexico, and watching them scramble for the money. This new TV project seems to be in a similar spirit, as we put the poor on parade and hopefully get to witness them as they do something dumb. But modern society is more mature than that junior high acquaintance, right?
Robot cameras ‘will predict crimes before they happen’
By Andrew Johnson
“CCTV: By learning behaviour patterns, computers could soon alert police when an unmanned camera sees ‘suspicious’ activity”
What?!? How is letting them be born stranger than chopping them up for science???
A Home for Their Embryos
By Ellen S. Glazer
Carla has both a close friend and a close family member who are struggling with infertility and she acknowledges that she thought about donating the embryos to one of them. As an infertile person with close friends who had adopted, Carla had many positive feelings about adoption. How wonderful, it briefly seemed, to have someone close to her “adopt†her embryos. However, like most others who give some thought to embryo adoption, Carla realized that giving her embryos to someone else was fundamentally different from adoption: adoption is a loving solution to a social problem. This, by contrast, would mean bringing children into the world whose fate had been sealed in an embryology lab. It was simply too strange — the idea that their full biological children would be raised in another family. The fact that that family would be close to them did not make the option any more appealing.