Tag: human beings

On
Bill Dagnon

Americans must remember our founding beliefs

To the editor:

Thank you for your editorial, “We’re better than this!” in the November 1 Catholic Herald. The vision that all men are created equal anchors our respect for each other and inspires our behavior toward each other.

This belief moved our country’s founders to break away from the British Empire, to declare independence, and begin the process of developing a workable self-governing system. Neighboring Canada, for instance, did not have such an inspiration and remained a part of the British empire for decades.

Read More
On
Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk

Editing our genes? We must be vigilant about use of new techniques

A number of serious diseases are known to occur because of defects or mutations in our DNA.

Curing such diseases could in principle be carried out by rewriting the DNA to fix the mutated base pairs. Yet until recently, scientists have remained largely stymied in their attempts to directly modify genes in a living animal.

New gene-editing technique

Findings described in the March 30, 2014, issue of Nature Biotechnology, however, reveal that a novel gene-editing technique, known as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), can be used successfully in mice to reverse disease symptoms for a liver defect known as type I tyrosinemia. In humans, this potentially fatal ailment affects about one in 100,000 people.

Read More
On
Mary C. Uhler, editor

Endangered species?

One definition of an endangered species is “a population of organisms which is at risk of becoming extinct because it is either few in numbers, or threatened by changing environmental or predation parameters.”

We usually don’t think about people as an endangered species. In fact, we seem to hear more about overpopulation than whether we have enough human beings in the world.

Read More