Last evening the Center co-sponsored, in conjunction with Diocese of Fort-Wayne-South Bend, a marvelous talk by Rev. Dr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk on the ethics of stem cell research. Fr. Tad is a staff ethicist and Director of Education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, and a priest of the Fall River Diocese in Massachusettes (his PhD, in neuroscience, is from Yale; he also worked for several years as a molecular biologist at Massachusettes General Hospital/Harvard Medical School). I'd like especially to thank Fred Everett, Director of the Office of Family Life at the diocese, for bringing Fr. Tad to our attention and for doing so much to make his talk such a great success. I found the most striking aspect of Fr. Tad's presentation to be the large number of amazing, documented success stories that can already be attributed to adult stem cell research--as compared to the zero number of successes achieved by embryonic stem cell research. Below is the link to a pamphlet written by Fr. Tad for the Family Research Council, which sums up the heart of his presentation at Notre Dame last night. I heartily recommend Fr. Tad to anyone who might be looking for a speaker who can convincingly distinguish between the facts and the fairy tales in public comment about stem cell research.

http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=BC04C01

Daniel McInerny