Northwestern students given live sex show

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Michael

And all the (relevant) responses have been amazingly mature:

More than 100 Northwestern University students watched as a naked 25-year-old woman was penetrated by a sex toy wielded by her fiancee during an after-class session of the school’s popular “Human Sexuality” class.

The woman said she showed up at the Feb. 21 lecture in the Ryan Family Auditorium in Evanston expecting just to answer questions, but was game to demonstrate. The course’s professor on Wednesday acknowledged some initial hesitation, but said student feedback was “uniformly positive.”

And Northwestern defended the class and its professor.

“Northwestern University faculty members engage in teaching and research on a wide variety of topics, some of them controversial and at the leading edge of their respective disciplines,” said Alan K. Cubbage, vice president for University Relations. “The University supports the efforts of its faculty to further the advancement of knowledge.”

Fantastic. Several students and the couple consented to the showing. And it happened. I find this incredibly refreshing. I’m sure there’s plenty of rage from the sexually immature Christian right, but who cares? They aren’t relevant to adult discussions on sexuality anyway.

I agree with other comments in the article that this is rather shocking, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s reality. People really do have sex and they really do use toys and they really do role play and they really do engage in fetishes. Not everyone is required to be comfortable discussing or viewing any of these things, or even doing many of them themselves, but I think it’s great that there are people out there – especially school administrations – that are mature enough to allow this. I think the ending quote from the class professor, John Michael Bailey, sums things up nicely:

“Do I have any regrets?” he wrote on Wednesday. “It is mostly too early to say. I certainly have no regrets concerning Northwestern students, who have demonstrated that they are open-minded grown ups rather than fragile children.”

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Embyonic stem cells

Posted on January 27, 2009 by Michael

The FDA has approved a study which will inject embyonic stem cells into humans.

The Geron corporation announce the approval today. The therapy used in the study is designed to treat spinal cord injuries by injecting stem cells — which are able to transform into the many different types of cells we need in our bodies — directly into the patients’ spinal cords.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted clearance of the company’s application for the clinical trial of GRNOPC1 in patients with acute spinal cord injury.

“This marks the beginning of what is potentially a new chapter in medical therapeutics – one that reaches beyond pills to a new level of healing: the restoration of organ and tissue function achieved by the injection of healthy replacement cells,” said Geron’s president and CEO. Dr. Thomas B. Okarma.

“The neurosurgical community is very excited by this new approach to treating devastating spinal cord injury,” said Dr. Richard Fessler, a professor of neurological surgery at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University.

While, according to the article this doesn’t have much to do with the recent shift from hating science and its beauty to embracing truth (the shift from Bush to Obama), it is pretty exciting. Stem cells are wonderful things. If some major theraputic treatment does not arise out of these cells, I’ll be awfully surprised (and the scientific community). I think it may be safe enough to say if many treatments do not come from stem cells, the surprise will be huge around the world. These far-from-conscious cells are the future of medical science.

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