Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 212: What About Synthetic Embryos?

A great deal is at stake in these kinds of synthetic embryo experiments that threaten to manipulate and destroy human life.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 196 : New Cures from Embryonic Stem Cells?

Receiving a diabetes treatment produced with embryonic stem cells signals a willingness on our part to tolerate the killing of younger human beings in order to benefit others who are older.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 140: How Does the Catholic Church Resolve New Bioethical Questions?

Many people appreciate that the Catholic Church holds firm and well-defined positions on moral questions, even if they may remain unsure about how or why the Church actually arrives at those positions, especially when it comes to unpacking new scientific developments like embryonic stem cell research.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 109: Renegade Researchers and the Future of Biomedical Research

Respect for our own progeny, then, will have the obvious consequence that human embryos should not be generated in the laboratory for premeditated destruction, nor for cellular cannibalization by scientists.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 063: Spinning Stem Cell Fairy Tales

In a way, then, embryonic stem cells have become a great modern secular fairy-tale, even a kind of surrogate for our yearning for immortality.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationSeptember 30, 2010Stem Cell Research

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 054: Stem Cell Ethics and the Things We Refuse to Do…

We cannot choose evil that good might come, nor can we ever afford to sell our souls by ignoring the sacrosanct humanity of the embryo, that tiny creature that each of us once was ourselves.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 046: The Obama Stem Cell Darkness

Sadly, the President’s stem cell decision encourages this kind of unethical behavior by an emotional appeal to patient desperation.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 036: Half Human, Half Animal?

…only the most cursory ethical reflection is needed to grasp the moral problem with creating human offspring in laboratories, using an admixture of cow components, in order to scientifically cannibalize them.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 030: The Holy Grail of Reprogramming: A New Era for Stem Cells?

Reprogramming provides patient-specific stem cells… but without using women’s eggs, without killing embryos, and without crossing moral lines.

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationDecember 30, 2007Stem Cell Research, Embryos

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 024: Debating the Embryo’s Fate

As I watched him, the rhetorical thought flashed through my mind, patterned on the language of embryonic stem cell advocates: ‘…he’s so small, so insignificant: what if a cure for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes could be developed to benefit all of suffering mankind, by promoting scientific research that depended on killing just a single little boy like him.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 022: Recapturing the Soul of Bioethics

…women (and men) should never be paid for their eggs (or sperm), as we insist they not be paid for organ donations. This is done to prevent the human body from becoming “commodified” by powerful economic and market forces, and to stave off the prospect of trafficking in human parts.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 015: Guilt-Free Pluripotent Stem Cells?

While the quest for 'guilt-free stem cells' is certainly a good one, the so-called 'embryo biopsy' approach to generating embryonic stem cells fails to deliver...

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, PhD—Director of EducationSeptember 30, 2006Embryos, Stem Cell Research

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 013: Thawing the Frozen Embryo Myths

...parents must be especially attentive to never hand over their embryonic children who are still frozen to researchers eager to extract their stem cells.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 011: Fetal Farming and the New Slavery

In today’s society we almost nonchalantly sanction the production of a five day-old human life to destroy it. Tomorrow it may be a three month-old, then an eight-month old fetus.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 008: Theology, or Embryology?

Science, quite apart from religious dogma, affirms dogmatically that every person walking around in the world was once an embryo. This absolute scientific dogma admits of no exceptions.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 007: Good Ends, Evil Means & Fraudulent Science

Given the enormous pot of glory perceived by scientists at the end of that rainbow, researchers in their frantic rush hardly paused to catch their breath and consider the deeper questions raised by this technology.

Making Sense of Bioethics: Column 001: Novel Ideas for Stem Cells Without Embryos

Since OAR stem cells would not be derived from embryos, and would not be embryos themselves, it would be morally permissible to culture and grow them or manipulate them in the lab as needed, in an attempt to come up with new therapies for patients.

“Making Sense of Bioethics” CMS