Campus Notes

Award Worthy?

Last year the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard gave an award for investigative reporting to David Willman of The Los Angeles Times. Willman, in turn, has picked up a few other notable trophies.

“He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, first, as a member of a team thrown into the breach to cover a disastrous earthquake, and, second, in 2001, for his own investigation into the Food and Drug Administration’s very flawed drug approval process,” Alex Jones of the Kennedy School pointed out.

I can’t speak about the earthquake but I did some reporting on the FDA myself back then stemming from some recalls of drugs that the agency had approved. To be sure, the FDA approves drugs in an inconsistent manner.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, for example, has compiled many a study on drugs available internationally, and their benefits, that the FDA will not put its seal on. Conversely, the agency approved AZT for AIDS with considerably less available research than it has demanded of other prescriptions.

The recalled drugs of 2000-2001 were a different story altogether. Those drugs were recalled due to side effects when taken with a conflicting medication that were impossible to ascertain via lab tests.

Coming to a campus near you

Look for the Al Gore cinematic offering to supplant Fahrenheit 9/11 as a favorite of left-wing movie buff professors who like to require viewing of their favorite films for academic credit. An Inconvenient Truth, in its original form, bragged that the scientific consensus that global warming is a definite trend to be reckoned with runs about 972-0.

What Mr. Gore and his scriptwriters do not mention is that that figure comes from an article that appeared in Science magazine that was written by a professor from the California state university system. The editors of Science had to run a correction in the very next issue because the instructor had missed 11,000 articles in her review of scientific literature.

Darwin on Steroids

“Yale University researchers are hard at work on the island of St. Kitts,” Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council reports. “They are injecting human brain cells into the skulls of feral monkeys who have Parkinson’s disease.”

“Don’t worry, says Yale’s Gene Redmond.” Of course these sons of Eli are more concerned with maintaining the purity of politically correct animals than dodging a federal ban on cloning.

“There seems to be little or no chance that the monkeys would be ‘humanized’ because of the relatively few and highly specialized human cells that are being implanted,” Redmond had said, according to Perkins. “Gene Redmond’s work is federally funded,” Perkins reports. “Last year, the National Academy of Sciences gave a green light to such experiments.”

“Yale’s is not the only such work going on.” Harvard is pursuing its own experiments and so are scientists in communist China.

“Harvard researchers are trying to clone embryonic humans using rabbit eggs to eliminate the need for women to give up their eggs,” Perkins reports. “Scientists in China have injected human blood cells into embryonic goats.”

“The goats have now matured.” In an earlier dispatch, Perkins had written about the solicitation of egg donors on campuses ranging from that of Berkeley to the grounds at the U. S. Naval Academy.

“They are not really ‘donors,’ since the women who sell their eggs in such transactions are reduced to hens,” Perkins observed. “Most industrial nations ban payment for human eggs.”

“But the Supreme Court has not considered importing those foreign laws.”(Italics in original.)

Where are the usual champions of women’s rights when they are being treated as lab animals? Federal agencies okay it, Perkins reports.

“Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) allows this trafficking to continue virtually unregulated,” Perkins writes. “Some students, bearing a heavy load of debt from college student loans, find this temptation too hard to resist.”

“Current law allows outfits like the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM)—the fertility clinic’s own association—to set the rules.” But are any women’s studies centers on campuses anywhere planning on holding vigils to protest what looks like the demeaning treatment of women?

Mal Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.