(August 2004) On 27th December, 2002, Dr. Brigitte Boissilier, scientific director of Clonaid, claimed the birth of the first cloned human. The announcement was greeted with revulsion from the general public and skepticism among the scientific community. Although the world still awaits scientific verification of this procedure, the claim intensified the ongoing public debate regarding this technology and its potential uses. Cloning has been hypothesized to have the potential to revolutionize at least two aspects of human life. Therapeutic cloning aims to produce embryonic stem cells which, because of their multipotentiality, have been proposed as a source of cells for…

In the past 50 years, antibiotics have been critical in the fight against many diseases and infections. Their discovery was one of the leading causes for the dramatic rise of average life expectancy in the 20th century and their significance to public health would be impossible to overstate. Antibiotics are defined as any compound which either kills or severely impedes the growth of bacteria. Upon the introduction of penicillin into general clinical practice in 1944, formerly deadly illnesses such as Strep throat and tuberculosis became instantly curable. Today, our dependence on antibiotics is absolute. In 1998, in the United States,…