My ethics are deontological, embryos blastocysts and anything else you might happen to call the product of a fertilized egg from the moment of its activation through its teleological end of birth belong in the womb. Therefore it is the right thing to do to put them there if they are not in such a place.

What nice, long words you use, Gramma.

Taking your position to its logical conclusion, you must be opposed to removing those eggs in the first place since "they belong there". Therefore, you are opposed to all of the benefits that come from their use, including IVF.

Therefore it is the right thing to do to put them there if they are not in such a place.

This certainly does not follow, deontological ethics or not. You are considering a disparate set of events to be a connected chain when you make such a claim. If I run across an abandoned broken down car, it does not follow that I must fix it simply because its place is "on the road". It may be beyond repair. It may be too expensive. It may be just plain ugly. The person who abandoned the car and the person who finds the car are unrelated, as are their respective moral obligations.

Your reliance on teleology to absolve you of any moral responsibility of your actions is disingenuous, unless you are willing to defer to nature in all of your dealings with this planet. Do you take aspirin for headaches? I strongly suspect the answer is "yes". Therefore, your morals in this regard are now relative to whatever motivates your opinion in this matter, the most common being a religious motivation.

Your relative morals should never be the basis for urging or compelling someone to adhere to your wishes, however heartfelt they might be. You are not the only one on this mudball with free will.

Are you willing to submit to society deciding when you are no longer useful and determining your end even if you do not agree with it?

If find this question snide, because it equates a living, breathing person with an embryo or a blastocyst.

Ray, while it's admirable that you feel the need to defend your ambulance-chaser brethren, I'm sure you do not need to be told that one word & sentence replies you give do not make your case.

Unfortunately this is severely mitigated by two groups - lawyers and patients. The original article could equally be titled 'why lawyers hate science' - as the parent says, many judgements against doctors are based on whether something could have been done, not whether there was evidence to support doing it, or even whether it would have been effective.

That is sheer and utter nonsense.

Would you disagree that doctors in this country practice defensive medicine far more aggressively than in counties where torts have been restrained? This simple fact belies your "utter nonsense" claim.

and the demands of anxious patients significantly skew treatment away from the scientific ideal

Nonsense.

Again, you fail to explain the reasons for your disagreement. IMO it is a simple claim to prove - just take a look at the avalanche of prescription drug ads we see. Big Pharma would NOT drop $4 billion a year on this stuff without an expected ROI. The ads continue, therefore there is an ROI. QED, this has an impact on patient perception away from the scientific ideal toward Big Pharma's profit ideal.

Now here on /. we have a bunch of armchair engineers believing they could do better?

You must be new here. If even 1% of the Slashdotters here found the will to get up off the couch, we could build our own manned Mars mission and ensure we pack a squeegee or two to clean the Rover solar panels.

Of course, D.N.F. will be out any day now, so on the couch we will stay.

You have to admit thought, the mental image of some geek suddenly appearing on the Rover's cameras with a bottle of windex and some paper towels at Houston is worth a smile or two...

Obama said it himself: people are ascribing their hopes and dreams on a man because he is a blank-slate in terms of experience.

People are ascribing their hopes and dreams on the man because the country is so fucking desperately jacked up from 20 years of Republican Presidents spending us into oblivion they need that kind of hope.

They've always underestimated our capacity to make things happen.

Unfortunately, they only have to be right once.

They need to make it cool again for the younger generations instead of boring as hell geeks in space.

Bah, throw a couple of Playstations in the capsule and just wait and see how many of the "younger generation" suddenly get interested.