Guess who audits the Chicago Public Schools? “A request for copies of all audits performed by [Arthur] Andersen since 1995 has been made under the Freedom of Information Act and ignored this year, as it has been for the past five years,” writes Tom Sharp in Substance (February). Sleep well.
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Eeeyuuuuukkkk! How does University of Chicago professor and Bush National Bioethics Commission chairman Leon Kass defend his hostility toward stem-cell research and cloning? “With a doctrine that he calls ‘the wisdom of repugnance,’” writes Jerome Groopman in the New Yorker (February 4), “which states, basically, that if you find something repugnant–if you just don’t think it’s right–then it must be wrong. The problem with this argument is that it is impervious to reason and severely constrained by time and place. Whether repugnance really offers wisdom depends, of course, on what you find repugnant. The practice of autopsy, which made modern medicine possible, was for centuries widely considered repugnant.”
Martin Luther in the middle of the road. “The loudest voices in science” tend to present it from an atheistic viewpoint, said Lutheran research astronomer Grace Wolf-Chase of the Adler Planetarium and the University of Chicago at a January church “consultation on faith and science,” according to a February 1 press release from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She also said that many prominent Christians portray science as their enemy, but scientists who have no problem practicing both their science and their faith are rarely heard from.
