From the bioethical front ...

• "Doctors: let us kill disabled babies" (The Sunday Times, Nov. 5, 2006) [Compare the Nazi Euthanazia program]
  
  
• "Plan to create human-cow embryos" (BBC News, Nov. 6, 2006) [Compare J. Bottom, "The Pig-Man Cometh," The Weekly Standard (Oct. 23, 2000), reporting on news that an American company, Biotransplant, and an Australian company, Stem Cell Sciences, had successfully crossed a human being with a pig by inserting the nuclei of cells from a human fetus into the pigs' eggs:

  In the midst of all this [when Harpers's Bazaar can advise women to keep their faces unwrinkled by having themselves injected with fat culled from human cadavers], the creation of a human-pig arrives like thing expected. We have reached the logical end, at last. We have become that people that, once upon a time, our ancestors used fairy tales to warn their children against -- and we will reap exactly the consequences those tales foretold. Like the coming true of an old story -- the discovery of the philosopher's stone, the rubbing of a magic lantern -- biotechnology is delivering the most astonishing medical advances anyone has ever imagined. But our sons and daughters will mate with the pig-men, if the pig-men will have them. And our swine-snouted grandchildren -- the fruit not of our loins, but of our arrogance and our bright test tubes -- will use the story of our generation to teach a moral to their frightened litters.

  Of course this will not literally happen: that is not the point. The point is that beneath all the professional reassurances that the creation of human-cow or human-pig embryos are 'only' for the purposes of growing experimental stem cells for prospective medical purposes lie the goeteic (from Greek: goeteia - sorcery, magic) assumptions of 'black magic' -- the assumption that a legitimate avenue of scientific mastery over nature is to be found through the power of "breaking" nature, unpatterning its patterns and uncreating creation.]