Latest Blog Articles
KILLER IN MY CLASSROOM?
By Don C. Reed The story I am about to tell you is true, subject only to the vagaries of memory… Call him Y. He was a student in my 8th grade English classroom, someone I had known for a long time, because we used to give him rides to various sports practices. He...
OF SHARKS, AND LIVER DISEASE
By Don C. Reed Her name was Vanessa; she was six years old, and fighting liver disease. To keep her alive, her family had to monitor every gram of food she ate. She would sometimes be so hungry, after having eaten her tiny meal, that she would ask to just smell...
A PRESIDENTIAL INVITATION: to the California Stem Cell Program
By Don C. Reed As a private citizen, I would like to invite President Biden to visit the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), our $8.5 billion stem cell program. Note: CIRM is a state agency, to which I have no official connection. But I have written...
THE PERSONHOOD BATTLE: Why It Matters to You
By Don C. Reed Think of a little plastic dish full of salt water, a Petri dish. And floating in the water are a dozen tiny dots, almost invisible: fertilized human eggs, or blastocysts. According to a recent decision of the Alabama Supreme Court, these...
DONALD TRUMP AND THE STRAWBERRY FIELDS
By Don C. Reed Wanting to earn money to buy a ring for my high school girlfriend, I got on the truck to the strawberry fields. “Dollar a row,” the foreman said, “Don’t bruise the fruit, or you don’t get paid.” The row before me was just a quarter mile long, but it...
WHY I COULD NEVER VOTE FOR DONALD TRUMP
By Don C. Reed Although raised in a Republican household, I could never vote for Donald Trump. This is for a variety of reasons, but today I want to touch on only one: I consider Trump an habitual liar, who will say whatever suits his needs of the...
ATTACK ON STEMCELL RESEARCH?
By Don C. Reed All but unmentioned in the recent Republican attack on the In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) procedure is the devastating effect it might have on stem cell research. Consider: a young married couple hopes to have a child. Their doctor tells them about IVF,...
IS AN ACORN AN OAK?
By Don C. Reed The Alabama Supreme Court recently declared that blastocysts (fertilized human eggs) were children. This decision may criminalize the In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) procedure. For many years virtually all conservative Republicans said: “ life begins at...
I VOTED THIS DAY
By Don C. Reed February 9th, 2024. I looked in the mailbox and there it was , the official document: small but crucial. I took the letter to the kitchen, placed it on the table, stuck my right index finger in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope — and ripped...
Don Reed's NEW BOOK - "Science, Politics, Stem Cells and Genes: California's War on Chronic Disease"
California’s War on Chronic Disease
By Don C. Reed, World Scientific Publishing, April 2023