Rights and Wrongs: Liberals, progressives, and biotechnology
By Will Saletan,
Slate
| 07. 13. 2007
This week, some big thinkers about biotechnology came to Washington for a "progressive bioethics summit." They invited me to go and talk to them. I like these people, but I'm not a progressive. I don't even think the word makes sense. And that made me ask something else: After two and a half years of covering moral debates about stem cells and other technologies, what do I think of this stuff? What the hell am I?
I have problems with liberals. A lot of them talk about religion as though it's a communicable disease. Some are amazingly obtuse to other people's qualms. They show no more interest in an embryo than in a skin cell. It's like I'm picking up a radio signal and they're not. I'd think I was crazy, except that a few billion other people seem to be picking up the same signal. At most liberal bioethics conferences, the main question in dispute, in one form or another, is whether to be more afraid of capitalism or religion.
I also hate the word progressive. It...
Related Articles
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 07.30.2026
As of this week in Montana, any biotech company with an experimental drug has a clear path to selling it to consumers. Companies whose drugs have been through preliminary testing—sometimes in as few as 10 healthy people—can pay $12,500 to...
By Katherine Long, Wall Street Journal | 07.31.2026
Kyla Simpson pulled up to the St. Johns County, Fla., sheriff’s office in a black SUV in June with two toddlers in the back seat. She had given birth to them and raised them.
“Mommy loves you, OK?” she said...
By John Travis , Science | 07.27.2026
Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine over the weekend said it would launch a “comprehensive investigation” into the previously undisclosed death last year of a 6-year-old girl who had received an experimental gene therapy from one of its scientists...
By Lillian Koll Ross , Ms. Magazine | 07.25.2026
In 1937, the U.S. began one of the largest sterilization campaigns in modern history in its colony of Puerto Rico. By the 1970s, one-third of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been sterilized, most without being properly informed...