Kunduz Hospital Tragedy

Not just a tragedy but also a lost opportunity to declare and covey our values

ABC News -- LUIS MARTINEZ -- 'Human Error' Cited in Mistaken US Airstrike on Kunduz Hospital

The accidental bombing of the Doctors without Borders hospital in Northern Afghanistan was a tragedy. This is especially so because Doctors without Borders represents in practice the primary moral concept of our government of equality understood as a respect for human dignity and our common humanity.

President Obama says that we have to fight radical terrorists with better ideas and values. Our government, the academics, the media, and even those running the presidential primaries, however, have focussed almost entirely on freedom rather than equality understood as a respect for an inherent personal dignity and our common humanity. What a lost opportunity to describe and garner global support for Doctors without Borders and to convey our primary value of equality.

My work The Moral Foundations of United States Constitutional Democracy: An Analytical and Historical Inquiry into the Primary Moral Concept of Equality can be freely accessed at www.moralfoundations.com See Also the my blogs on the following:

• Equality as an Affirmation of our Common Humanity
• What Medical Ethics has to offer the Larger Fields of Moral and Political Philosophy

George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation

George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation

"NOW THEREFORE, I do recommend and assign THURSDAY, the TWENTY-SIXTH DAY of NOVEMBER next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be..."

The Gene Hackers

The Gene Hackers
A powerful new technology enables us to manipulate our DNA more easily than ever before.
The New Yorker -- MICHAEL SPECTER -- Annals of Science --NOVEMBER 16, 2015 ISSUE

A technical but very informative article on the research in genetics.

It didn’t take Zhang or other scientists long to realize that, if nature could turn these molecules into the genetic equivalent of a global positioning system, so could we. Researchers soon learned how to create synthetic versions of the RNA guides and program them to deliver their cargo to virtually any cell. Once the enzyme locks onto the matching DNA sequence, it can cut and paste nucleotides with the precision we have come to expect from the search-and-replace function of a word processor. “This was a finding of mind-boggling importance,” Zhang told me. “And it set off a cascade of experiments that have transformed genetic research.”

With CRISPR, scientists can change, delete, and replace genes in any animal, including us.