Author: Margaret McLean

Redesigning Humans: The Final Frontier

[1] Twenty years ago, bioengineers fiddled with plastic and wires and transducers while building gizmos. Today, a bioengineer is more likely to be tinkering with cells and chromosomes and genes while deciphering the stuff of life. [2] Gregory Stock’s book “Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future” preaches the promise of bioengineering-longer life and health spans, […]

ACT’s “Therapeutic Cloning” — Help or Hype?

[1] Our heated summer-time debates over human embryonic stem cell research were all but forgotten until we were jolted over the sleepy Thanksgiving weekend by an announcement from researchers at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), a small biotech company in Massachusetts. On TV screens, in the pages of “U.S. News & World Report,” and online in […]

A Step Into the Private Lives of Stem Cells

[1] In his first nationwide address as president, George W. Bush said that he would allow federal funds to be committed to research on those stem cells already obtained from human embryos “where the life and death decision has already been made.” Significantly, Bush’s first prime time remarks focused not on the tumbling NASDAQ or […]