Nicholas G. Evans Quotes
The fact that the alcohol lobby doesn’t want a particular kind of research to go forward should be a strong reason to fund it immediately”
Lobbyists from industries that believe that research in an area might produce findings and results that are inimical to their business or ideology, often lobby to prohibit the research outright or reduce or eliminate the funding for that research.
Nicholas G. Evans, April 5, 2018
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. The Congressmen who voted for Prohibition in the next century had not read or believed this quotation of Twain’s.
Father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. Father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher
William Ashley Sunday. Sunday and many other prohibitionists then believed that mental retardation was caused by parents who drank alcohol extensively. What we know today is that a pregnant woman drinking can cause Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and affect the intellect of the fetus when growing up. It was true that the alcohol industry had undue influence in many states. However, with prohibition, organized crime then gained even more influence upon state and local government, and America had gone from bad to worse.
To this day efforts to regulate alcohol, the nation’s most frequent drug of choice and cause of addiction and violence, are met with the same “virtues” of employment and tax revenue. It was not until the 1990s that we learned that the revenue from alcohol taxes was far less than the cost of society coping with the problems of drinking and addiction.
Despite the known link to crime, and the fact that alcohol kills many times more Americans that do illicit drugs, Mr. Bennett and most of his successors did not target drinking in their various war on drug efforts despite the fact that alcohol is a much more dangerous and addicting drug than any of the illicit drugs. In the George W, Bush administration, health authorities in the government were ordered not to tell the public that alcohol was a drug despite the fact that all the Surgeon Generals and medical science has explained that it is not only a dangerous drug, but is a drug that induces violence more so than any other drug. The alcohol lobby did not want the public to associate the alcohol industry with the evils that drug dealers produce, so they used their political clout with the Bush administration for whom the industry provided large political contributions as well as conservative political consultants.
When couples use in vitro fertilization to have children, they usually produce several fertilized embryos one of which is implanted into the womb of the mother. The other embryos can produce stem cells which are cells that can grow into any other kind of cell—brain cells, bone, cells, kidney cells, stc. Therefore they have the most promise for medical research. However, some people regard the embryos as human beings at an early stage of development and see the embryos as life. For them the notion of using that “life” for medical research where a human being will not be produced but instead a medicine or replacement cells for a sick person crosses a moral line of what is proper for a life form. Others observe that the embryos are kept alive in freezers and will be thrown away if not needed so why not use them to help mankind. At the other extreme some are opposed to allowing in vitro fertilization to begin with, but there have been over a million people born with this technique to couples who otherwise would not have been able to have children.
Nicholas G. Evans recently completed his PhD in Applied Philosophy and Biosecurity at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Australian National University, Canberra. Prior to this, he completed his BSc (Hons) in Physics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include Professional and Applied Ethics, Ethical Theory, Public Health, Science Policy, and the History and Philosophy of Science. His first edited collection, "The Routledge Handbook of Ethics and War," (coedited with Adam Henschke and Frtiz Allhoff), was released in July 2013. In 2013 Nick was also an investigator with the ANU National Security Centre grant "Cyberwarfare, Cyberterrorism, Cybercrime: Mapping the Ethical Terrain." In the beginning of 2014, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Monash University Centre for Human Bioethics in Melbourne. Nick recently immigrated to the United States, where he lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, Kelly
