Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Thirty-five years after Roe v. Wade, the pro-life movement faces a new challenge: biotechnology. The first human biotech issue, embryonic stem-cell research, looks like an easy call. Stem cells could save millions of lives. And the entity we currently sacrifice to get them—a sacrifice that may soon be unnecessary—is a tiny, undeveloped ball of cells. The question, like the embryo, seems a no-brainer.

For pro-lifers, that’s precisely the problem. Biotechnology is arguably more insidious than abortion. Abortions take place one at a time and generally as a response to an accident, lapse or nasty surprise. Their gruesomeness actually limits their prevalence by arousing revulsion and political opposition. Conventional stem-cell harvesting is quieter but bolder. It’s deliberate and industrial, not accidental and personal. In combination with cloning, it entails the mass production, exploitation and destruction of human embryos. Yet its victims don’t look human. You can’t protest outside a fertility clinic waving a picture of a blastocyst. You have to explain what it is and why people should care about it.

This is the task Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen undertake in Embryo. To reach a secular and skeptical public, they avoid religion and stake their case on science. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton and a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and Tollefsen, a philosopher at the University of South Carolina, locate humanity not in a soul but in a biological program. To be a complete human organism, they write, an entity must possess a developmental program (including both its DNA and epigenetic factors) oriented toward developing a brain and central nervous system. The program begins at conception; therefore, so does personhood.

Brother, have you heard the bad news?

It was supposed to be good news, like the kind in the Bible. After three years, $2.4 million, and 1.7 million prayers, the biggest and best study ever was supposed to show that the prayers of faraway strangers help patients recover after heart surgery. But things didn’t go as ordained. Patients who knowingly received prayers developed more post-surgery complications than did patients who unknowingly received prayers—and patients who were prayed for did no better than patients who weren’t prayed for. In fact, patients who received prayers without their knowledge ended up with more major complications than did patients who received no prayers at all.

For the first time in 14 years, legal abortion in the United States is in serious jeopardy. In recent days, the shape of this assault has become clear. First, on the morning of Justice Samuel Alito Jr.’s debut, the Supreme Court announced that it would review the constitutionality of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, setting up what anti-abortion activists hope will be the beginning of the end of Roe v. Wade . The next day, South Dakota lawmakers passed a ban on virtually all abortions, and abortion rights groups vowed to litigate it all the way to the high court, which would force the justices either to overturn or reaffirm Roe. A few days later, the court told the abortion rights side it could no longer use racketeering laws to halt blockades and protests at abortion clinics.

Judith Rich Harris calls No Two Alike a scientific detective story. The mystery is why people—even identical twins who grow up in the same home with the same genes—end up with different personalities. The detective is Harris herself, a crotchety amateur, housebound because of an illness, who takes on the academic establishment armed only with a sharp mind and an Internet connection. Harris the author scrupulously follows clues, Harris the protagonist drives the story forward through force of character, arriving at a theory of personality that could be said to describe herself.