Articles and Commentary

While gay families and their supporters await the California Supreme Court's ruling on the constitutionality of a voter-approved law banning same-sex marriage, a few researchers and pundits are proposing that same-sex procreation with bio-engineered gametes will undermine one of the...

Bold books that offer grand theses to explain the course of human history are risky endeavors. Few such attempts rightfully linger in the collective conscious: from the 18th century's The Wealth of Nations to the following century's Das Capital and...

Some time ago a bright young graduate student was driving me to a conference at a noted Midwestern university. He had a Ph.D. in molecular biology and was finishing his law degree, after which he planned to work for...

Re "Stem cell housecleaning," editorial, Dec. 12

Your editorial appropriately highlights fundamental flaws of Proposition 71, the initiative that created the state's $3-billion stem cell research agency. Its governing board is stacked with representatives of the very institutions seeking to...

Last week was a busy one for stem cell research. But amid the coverage of major technical advances, an all-too-predictable scandal erupted in California's stem cell program. The details reveal improper and potentially illegal influence on the allocation of public...

As the Nov. 21 front-page article "Advance May End Stem Cell Debate" implied, religious conservatives are not the only ones concerned about the use of human cloning for stem cell research. Many liberals, progressives and supporters of women's health and...

Research teams at two prestigious universities announced a major feat of biological alchemy this week: They've taken ordinary human cells and turned them into cells with all the characteristics and promise of embryonic stem cells.

This entirely new way to...

The debate over cloning embryos for stem cell research has been one of the most divisive and unpleasant public controversies of the last decade. Partisans on both sides have sought to polarize the issue for political advantage rather than look...