Free Republic

Many of the greatest horrors of the history of humanity owe their occurrence solely to the establishment and social enforcement of a false reality. With gratitude to the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper and his important 1970 essay “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power” for the term and idea, we can refer to these alternative realities as ideological pseudo-realities. Pseudo-realities, being false and unreal, will always generate tragedy and evil on a scale that is at least proportional to the reach of their grip on power—which is their chief interest—whether social, cultural, economic, political, or (particularly) a combination of several or...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for a "formal deprogramming" for many supporters of former President Trump during a new CNN interview.

Since the January 6th riot at the Capitol, the talking heads in the media, political elites, and other progressive activists have been opining on the need to deprogram Trump supporters as they attempt to paint us all as craven conspiracy theorists with the potential for violence. You see this in their obsession with Representative Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), a freshman member with no real political power. Yet, they take her past comments and extrapolate her insane assertions to half the population. Yes, dear readers, if you liked the foreign policy or domestic policy implemented by the Trump administration better than...

J. Hanna/Weizmann InstituteImproved recipe. After 6 days of reprogramming, nearly 100% cells that lack Mbd3 (right) have become reprogrammed (yellow). Few unaltered cells (left) have made the transition, remaining red. Given the right instructions in the lab, mature cells can turn back into embryoniclike ones that researchers covet, but the process is frustratingly slow and inefficient. By removing a molecular brake, scientists have now figured out how to reprogram cells with almost 100% efficiency.In a process called cellular reprogramming, researchers increase the expression of four genes in skin, blood, or other mature cells to turn them into induced pluripotent stem...

Scientists at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg have developed a model that makes predictions from which differentiated cells – for instance skin cells – can be very efficiently changed into completely different cell types – such as nerve cells, for example. This can be done entirely without stem cells. These computer-based instructions for reprogramming cells are of huge significance for regenerative medicine. The LCSB researchers present their results today in the prestigious scientific journal Stem Cells. This is the first paper based solely on theoretical, yet practically proven, results of computational biology to...

(Los Angeles) -- Will Smith may be upset with some Web gossip sites. But the Jewish Defense League is hot with him over the comments he made in a Scottish newspaper about Adolf Hitler. The JDL rips into Smith in a release posted on its Web site on Christmas Eve. After quoting Smith's comments, the group says what the actor says is "ignorant, detestable and offensive." It goes on to say that Smith's words "spit on the memory of every person murdered by the Nazis" and "stick a knife in the backs of every veteran" who fought against the Nazi...

Adult skin cells turned to pluripotent stem cells without a cancer-causing agent. Cell reprogramming taken one step further.National Institutes of Health Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan has followed the announcement last week of his startling success in turning human skin cells to embryo-like stem cells, by reporting that he has done the same without the cancer-causing agent used in his original recipe.The work brings scientists perhaps one step closer to the goal of being to use patient-matched stem cells for therapy.Yamanaka first demonstrated his method for 'reprogramming' cells in mice. Last year he showed that he could produce...

It’s called “reprogramming.” Another technical term for it is “somatic cell dedifferentiation.” Just get those terms into your vocabulary because they’ll be around for the foreseeable future. As reported in two scientific papers published today, reprogramming is now the future of stem cell research and renders ethically controversial therapeutic cloning obsolete. Ever since the debate of embryo-destructive stem-cell research began in earnest in 1998 when researchers at the University of Wisconsin first isolated human embryonic stem cells, we’ve known that the best overall answer to the ethical impasse would be a solution that both allows the search for stem-cell related...

May 10, 2006, 6:21 a.m.Hitting RewindSome scientists are in hot pursuit of ethically acceptable alternatives that do not involve the destruction of embryos. By Father Thomas Berg The South Korean cloning forgery last fall has given a new impetus to the pro-cloning movement in the United States. Scientists in the U.S. are seeking to be the first to produce stem cells from cloned human embryos. On April 13, word came that Harvard University had cleared stem-cell researcher Doug Melton to pursue human cloning. Melton is a Harvard researcher with his own 4,000 sq. ft. basement laboratory, the location of which...

Hi, gang, I was a regular contributor to the Kerry Online Forum and am now a regular contributor to the Common Ground Common Sense forum. I am a liberal, but I'll be the first to admit, I don't have all the answers. In fact, many of hte questions that matter to me probably matter to you too. I'm concerned with questions about how to tame power, whether governmental or corporate. I'm concern with the rule of law and how we can get the powerful to take it seriously. I'm concerned with the erosion of civil liberties. And yes, I am...