Life Links 5/6/09

In the Telegraph, George Pitcher shares his thoughts about the recent visit of Phillip Nitschke, Australia's "Dr. Death," to Great Britain.

They are dangerous, yes. They take some sort of control kick from enabling deluded people in their care to kill themselves. But they are essentially simpletons, who have thought and debated no further than a rather babyish notion that if you are able and want to do something, then you should do so. Self-indulgent and dim-witted they most certainly are, but cogent proponents and impressive ambassadors for euthanasia and assisted suicide? Don't make me laugh.

Pfizer will license the University of Wisconsin's embryonic stem cell patents to test drugs.

The license with the university's patent and licensing arm, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, provides Pfizer the rights to work with human embryonic stem cells for drug research and discovery. Terms of the licensing agreement were not disclosed.

For years, the public was told that embryonic stem cells were the body's repair kits and researchers would soon use them to create cell-based therapies. It seems more and more that if embryonic stem cells ever provide any medical help it will be through drug testing, which is something I think most scientists knew all along. They also knew that "let us test our new drugs on embryonic stem cells instead of animals" wouldn't have been quite as a good of a seller as "we're going to cure diabetes, parkinson's, alzheimer's and spinal cord injuries."


The Daily 49er, the paper of Cal State Long Beach, has another atrocious editorial regarding the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform's display on campus. This one by journalism major Grady Dunne. He writes,

It is no coincidence the pro-life organization known as the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform visited Cal State Long Beach just days after the F.D.A approved that 17 year olds could purchase morning-after contraception pills.

And the evidence for this assertion would be???

Grady doesn't provide any. Which is not surprising considering it usually takes a fair amount of time (like months) and planning (including getting permission ahead of time) to put together the kind of display CBR uses and it's hard to prove CBR somehow knew way ahead of time when the FDA was going to allow 17-year-olds to get emergency contraception without a prescription. Grady then goes on to make a number of arguments regarding Plan B and CBR supposed position against it without ever noting CBR's rather convoluted thoughts on how emergency contraception works.

It's rather clear Grady couldn't come up with any rationale arguments for why displaying pictures of aborted children is so wrong so he just wrote about emergency contraception instead.