Brave New World
Welcome to the morally ambivalent new world and its updated version of eugenics: This BBC article celebrates the birth in Britain of the first baby tested in vitro for an altered form of the BRCA1 gene known to vastly increase the risk of breast cancer. The girl—whose family has been very hard hit by the…
Mark Shea has an oft-recited line that fits this turn of events well: Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life-forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories. In her San Francisco dining room…
Since it’s been a topic of discussion around here, it’s worth noting that — although Capitol Records continues on its litigious path, the Recording Industry Association of America is discerning the error of its ways: After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to…
We should all hope that Capitol Records fails in its efforts to claim a Providence family’s computer for inspection, but as the breadth of activities occurring on computers expands, the likelihood goes up that they will become subject to confiscation for one reason or another. In that light, even just the circumstances of the threat…
Such stories give one a sense that reality is slipping away: The family of a college student who killed himself live on the Internet say they’re horrified his life ended before a virtual audience, and infuriated that viewers of the live webcam or operators of the Web site that hosted it didn’t act sooner to…
Video games are getting serious: A 43-year-old Japanese woman whose sudden divorce in a virtual game world made her so angry that she killed her online husband’s digital persona has been arrested on suspicion of hacking, police said Thursday. The woman, who is jailed on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data,…
Monday’s call from the Projo editoral page for worldwide population control…There are just too many people in the world, and there are, of course, more every day — and 80 million more each year. The effects, in declining standards of living in many places, as well as in environmental degradation, are obvious. The increase should…
Welcome to the small-world reality of gay Westerner commercial baby creation outsourced to the third world: Yonatan Gher and his partner, who are Israeli, plan eventually to tell their child about being made in India, in the womb of a stranger, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked from an Internet lineup. The…
So how much of the Brave New World will be purely a matter of semantics? The man who stunned the world when he announced he was pregnant gave an intimate insight into his personal life in a revealing television interview with Oprah. Thomas Beatie stripped off for the cameras and bared his baby bump and…
Tom Shevlin sees Big Brother in the arrival of E-Z Pass: … a recent ABC survey found that almost three-quarters of Americans support expanding our surveillance apparatus including eighty six percent of Republicans who support Rudy Giuliani and over seventy percent of registered Democrats. So what’s the big deal? Why care? Because America was founded…
