Ethics

There are things about one's life and especially about one's children that cannot be known in advance and to which it would be foolish to assume a right outcome or a wrong one. How, for example, could you possibly know whether you and your family would be better off having had a boy child and then a girl, or a girl first, or two girls or two boys? What would your standard for comparison be? Which child would you have… more

In the mid-1990s, embryologist Jacques Cohen pioneered a promising new technique for helping infertile women have children. His technique, known as cytoplasmic transfer, was intended to "rescue" the eggs of infertile women who had undergone repeated, unsuccessful attempts at in vitro fertilization, or IVF. It involved injecting the cytoplasm found inside the eggs of a fertile donor, into the patient's eggs.

When the first baby conceived through cytoplasmic transfer was born in 1997, the press instantly hailed Cohen's technique… more

For Alan and Louise Masterton, the death of their daughter, Nicole, had a uniquely cruel twist. It was terrible enough that the3-year-old succumbed to burns suffered in an accident at the family's Monifieth, Scotland, home in 1999. But for the Mastertons, Nicole was more than just a cherished child -- she was a chromosomal miracle. The couple had spent 15 years trying to conceive a girl, bearing four sons in the process. When Nicole finally arrived in 1995, the Mastertons… more

At one end of the long conference table sat the lawyer, a tall man with silver-and-black hair, prominent cheekbones and a Baltimore accent, dressed in a charcoal-gray suit and white pin-stripe shirt with monogrammed cuffs. The others seated at the table wore lightweight dresses, bluejeans, overalls, cowboy boots and trucker caps. Their faces were somber and expectant. Some had driven hundreds of miles to Tulsa to be here.

The lawyer began the meeting with two questions. "Why did you… more

Last week's vote in the House to ban human cloning is something to celebrate. It may even be something momentous. The House passed, by 265 to 162, a bill sponsored by representative Dave Weldon of Florida that would ban the creation of all human clones. It rejected an alternative sponsored by Pennsylvania representative James Greenwood, and backed by the biotech lobby, that would have allowed the creation of cloned human embryos to be used for medical research and then destroyed.… more

George W. Bush is agonizing over his decision about federal policy on stem-cell research. And White House aides, meanwhile, are busily "backgrounding" reporters with tidbits designed to show that the president who normally prides himself on snappy management is consulting widely and thinking deeply on the subject.

For the inside-the-Beltway Washingtonians, it all makes for interesting reading, but for outside-the-Beltway Americans, there's not much reason to follow the circuities of Bush's pondering because, in effect, the decision has already… more

At various points in U.S. history, issues and events come along that make old ideologies obsolete, that make existing coalitions untenable, that make the contradictions within parties too pressing… more

Last year, a 10-month-old baby boy died in the hospital after a minor operation went wrong. The baby's parents, an American couple, had two other children and probably could have had another … more

In the fall of 1964 a twenty-one-year-old Berkeley undergraduate named Mario Savio climbed the steps of Sproul Hall and denounced his university for bending over backwards to "serve the need of American industry." Savio, the leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, accused the university of functioning as "a factory that turns out a certain product needed by industry" rather than serving as the conscience and a critic of society. To the modern ear this sixties rhetoric may sound outdated.… more