Wesley J. Smith

The New England Journal of Medicine still publishes objective scientific articles. But in the last decade-plus, it is just as notable for its hard left political opinion pieces about issues ranging from climate change, to race relations, to promoting “equity” (as distinguished from equality), to gun control, to supporting transitioning gender-dysphoric minors, and more.

Debra Malina, Ph.D., the first and so far, only “Perspectives” editor — an opinion section where most of the woke political screeds published by the NEJM are placed — is retiring. She has written a swan song piece taking credit for bringing blatant politics to the pages of the NEJM.

Malina writes that when she took the job, she had been hoping to obtain a tenured university position in English literature. Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it? Then, she brags about politicizing the Perspectives section:

The nature rights movement continues to advance into respectability with woefully insufficient resistance. Too many people don’t take the threat seriously because they consider it too crazy to be real.

But the sheer nuttiness of the campaign isn’t the only reason for the movement’s continuing successes. Nature rights activists seem nice. They are not verbal bomb throwers. Rather, they deploy passive language to sell radical environmental and anti-free-market agendas. That seeming mildness sedates some people into wrongly thinking that nature rights is not an acute threat to human liberty and flourishing.

A just published puff-piece interview published by The Water Diplomat with Dutch human and nature rights lawyer Jan van de Venis illustrates this tactic. Let’s take a look.

An awful story has broken into the headlines illustrating the moral peril of commercial surrogacy. From the Texas Tribune story: [McKenna] West, a nurse, entered a surrogacy agreement in Alaska, where she lives, with the intended parents, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, through Worldwide Surrogacy Specialists, LLC, a Connecticut-based surrogacy agency. Typically under gestational agreements like the one that West signed with Gilkar and Ahmed, the intended parents, not the surrogate, have the parental rights to make choices relating to the fetus. The fetus West is carrying was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome at 20 weeks of pregnancy, and Gilkar and Ahmed allegedly asked her to undergo an abortion and they have said they will refuse to let the Read More ›

The Washington Post has a heartwarming story about a Nashville cop who dissuaded a suicidal man from jumping off a bridge:

“It was emotional. This was an individual who had reached a level of frustration where he was having the worst day of his life,” Hotz said. “I just wanted to be able to develop trust with him and help him realize that tomorrow is another day and it will get better.”

“It was a combination of life circumstances that happened that brought him to a level of ultimate frustration and desperation,” Hotz said.

Even as they talked, Hotz said he remained afraid of what might happen next.…

“He was standing on the bridge and did lean over several times,” he said.

In recent years, editors of medical, science, and bioethics journals have proclaimed almost every major societal problem to be a “health emergency” or crisis. Off the top of my head, I can think of several: guns, racism, immigration enforcement, global warming, abortion restrictions, and fear of future pandemics. Now, the editors of The Lancet want to stoke fear of summer wildfires as the pretext to claim yet another public health emergency. From, “Wildfires, a Health Emergency“: Europe is burning. Wildfires in France and Spain have engulfed hundreds of square miles of land, destroying homes and forcing the evacuation of 330,000 people as the threat now moves east to Greece, Italy, and central Europe. The fires have been so large and Read More ›

Media outlets are reporting that Stanford scientists used AI to create an artificial virus. From the Wall Street Journal story:

Artificial-intelligence systems have been displaying some eye-opening new abilities in recent weeks: breaking out of their enclosures, hacking other companies, lying to people.

And now, for the first time, an AI model has created a new virus. A whole family of them, in fact.

In a study published in the journal Science, researchers at Stanford University and elsewhere said they successfully directed an AI model to create a collection of simple viruses that only infect bacteria and pose no threat to humans.

These particular viruses may not be dangerous, but what about the next ones scientists manufacture? What about potential attempts to test their virulence in humans? The approach in the Stanford lab sure sounds like a new form of gain-of-function research to me.

Say what you will about Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but he definitely cares about ensuring that organ transplant medicine remains ethical, and unlike many government functionaries, he and his department are actually doing something about it. Thus, on the back of Medicare decertifying a Florida organ procurement organization for cause in 2025, the government is now decertifying the Network for Hope that operates in Kentucky and a few other states.

The government warned the network last year that its procurement procedures were ethically deficient. But the organ procurement organization never cleaned up its act despite knowing it was being scrutinized, including, apparently, for seeking to procure organs from people who had not died.

The unethical cases involve a procedure sometimes known as heart death (as opposed to brain death). In a heart-death donation, the donor is usually receiving intensive care. That medical support is withdrawn with consent and if cardiac arrest occurs — sometimes it doesn’t and the patient is then to be returned to care — after three or so minutes the patient is declared-dead because cardiopulmonary function has irreversibly stopped. After that, the procurement commences.

Anthony Conwright argues in the New York Times that the Civil War should not be called by that name because it never was so called during its fighting.

Conwright is angry that back on the anniversary of Appomattox, President Trump marked the event by quoting Ulysses S Grant’s magnanimous statement that the “rebels are our countrymen again.” Never mind that Grant was carrying out Lincoln’s explicit policy of magnanimity toward the rebels as a means of reuniting the country (“with malice toward none, with charity for all” and all that).

Even more ridiculously, Conwright argues that calling the conflagration the “Civil War” somehow diminishes the evil of slavery abolished after the North’s victory. From “It Wasn’t a ‘Civil War:’ It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion“:

As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?

And what, exactly, is “human dignity?” Do we all possess it as a matter of objective truth, simply and merely because we are human, or must we earn our status by possessing particular capacities? Do AI and biotechnological advances threaten human dignity and diminish our moral standing? If so, what should public policy do about it? These are among the important — nay, crucial — questions with which we must grapple as we rush, so far with few regulatory brakes, toward a brave new world. Now, an ideologically odd pair of United States senators — the conservative Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and the progressive Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) want to do something about that. They are co-sponsoring the Human Dignity Read More ›

Over the past decade or so, the Nonhuman Rights Project has sought to obtain legal personhood for chimpanzees and elephants. The method to their madness is to seek writs of habeas corpus to release the animals from various means of confinement.

The group has failed so far. But it keeps gaining ground that should never have been lost. One high court judge in New York would have granted personhood and rights to chimps, and later, two judges in that court would have done so for elephants. Meanwhile, this fall the Hawaiian Supreme Court will review yet another elephant writ of habeas corpus case brought by the organization. Frankly, I fear the worst.

Michigan has seen similar habeas litigation involving chimps where the NhRP lost in the trial and appeals courts. The case involved seven chimps kept at a roadside zoo in apparently inappropriate circumstances from an animal-welfare perspective. As animal rights activists always do, the NhRP analogized the denial of rights to chimps to the oppression once imposed upon women and to slavery. The Court of Appeals judges weren’t buying. From the unanimously decided, Nonhuman Rights Project v. DeYoung Family Zoo (citations omitted):