Gun Control Needs Honest Debate, Not Neurohype

By Brendan P. Foht January 13, 2014

In an article making its way around the liberal blogosphere, Tim Phillips, the co-founder of the peace-and-reconciliation organization “Beyond Conflict” proposes the idea that “neuroscience can help settle the gun ...

Just What Is Wrong with Human Cloning?

By Brendan P. Foht May 20, 2013

If we weren’t in the middle of a perfect storm of national political controversies, last week’s announcement from Oregon of the first cloned human embryo might well be dominating the ...

Correcting Cloning Confusion

By Brendan P. Foht May 17, 2013

There has been a great deal of confusion and obfuscation surrounding the news this week that scientists have cloned human embryos for the first time. Embryonic stem-cell research advocates have ...

For First Time, Stem Cells Created Through Cloning — Why It’s Even More Unethical

By Brendan P. Foht May 15, 2013

There’s major news in the world of biomedical research today: For what seems to be the first time, scientists have successfully cloned human embryos. In a paper published online in the ...

Montana Senate Defeats Assisted-Suicide Prohibition

By Brendan P. Foht April 18, 2013

On Monday, the Montana state senate voted 27–23 to defeat a bill that would have definitively outlawed doctor-assisted suicide in the state. The legislation was first introduced in February as ...

Politics & Policy

Tea, Tobacco, and Science

By Brendan P. Foht March 11, 2013

A small exchange at a House subcommittee hearing this past Tuesday provided the occasion for a useful lesson about the proper relationship between science and politics. Dr. Francis Collins, the ...

End of the Road for the Stem-Cell Lawsuit

By Brendan P. Foht January 7, 2013

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in the long-running court casechallenging the Obama administration’s policy of funding research on embryonic stem cells. The legal challenge, which ...

Chris Murphy and the Audacity of Stem-Cell Hype

By Brendan P. Foht October 8, 2012

In Sunday’s debate between the two contenders for the Senate seat that Joe Lieberman is vacating, Democratic candidate representative Chris Murphy touted his support for human embryonic-stem-cell research. “In the ...

Scientists Turn Stem Cells into Sex Cells

By Brendan P. Foht October 5, 2012

This week, researchers working with mice reported in the journal Nature that they had successfully used stem cells to create oocytes (egg cells) for the first time. A similar approach could ...

The Bioethics of Womb Transplants

By Brendan P. Foht September 21, 2012

Earlier this week, doctors in Sweden announced that they had performed two uterus transplants — the first time the procedure has been done with living donors. (A uterus collected from ...