Insight on the News

Paying for VD

● An unusual Wyoming court decision recently awarded a woman $1.3 million damages from a man who allegedly had infected her with VD. Her testimony revealed that she had willingly engaged in intercourse with the man, but was not told that he had gonorrhea until the last time. She complained of pain and damage to her reproductive organs from the disease, perhaps making it impossible for her to have children.

Her lawyer stated that “this case stands for the proposition that citizens have the right to be protected against being negligently infected by VD . . . by the same rights that protect them against negligent drivers or the negligent manufacturers of a product.”

But was the negligence only on the part of the one who did the infecting? Are such persons alone responsible for the estimated 2.6 million cases of gonorrhea in the U.S.? Or does the fault lie in the moral climate that permits or promotes illicit sex outside of honorable marriage? That there is a price to pay for such conduct is only to be expected. “God is not one to be mocked,” says the Bible. “For whatever a man is sowing, this he will also reap; because he who is sowing with a view to his flesh will reap corruption from his flesh.”​—Gal. 6:7, 8.

$6 Million Man

● The chemical value of a human body has often been estimated to be a few dollars at most. But such estimates consider only the raw materials and in their simplest basic form. Recently Yale University biochemist Harold J. Morowitz checked a supply catalogue for prices of the complex and sophisticated chemical compounds that actually make up the human body. He found such substances as hemoglobin priced at $285 per gram; insulin at $48.50 per gram; the enzyme trypsin, $36; the amino acid bradykinin, $12,000; the milk-stimulating hormone prolactin, $17,500,000; and so on.

Morowitz concluded that humans are actually worth an average of about $245 per gram, dry weight. After discounting the two thirds water in his own 158-pound frame, he arrived at a value of $6,000,015.44 for the remaining substances! However, he says that if chemists had to synthesize all those compounds from raw materials rather than just separating them from existing natural products, the cost would be more like $6 billion. And though it is impossible for humans to assemble these chemicals into cells, he nevertheless estimated the cost of doing so at $6,000 trillion.

Is it reasonable to conclude that such marvelous complexity is merely the result of blind evolutionary chance? Or is the sounder judgment that of one appreciative observer who said: “In a fear-inspiring way I am wonderfully made. . . . Your eyes saw even the embryo of me, and in your book all its parts were down in writing”?​—Ps. 139:14, 16.

Adding and Taking Away

● After eighty-six years, the Mormon Church recently added another two written “revelations” to its scriptures. Both of the “revelations” hold out greater opportunities after death for people who either have not heard the gospel, have rejected it, or were too young to be ‘accountable’ at death.

On the other hand, Mormon “revelations” have not been so kind to living black church members as to dead unbelievers. When a protesting Mormon lay high-priest recently performed an unauthorized ordination of a black, Church authorities rejected the ordination, in keeping with their rule banning black members from the priesthood. The racial ban appears to take away from the Bible that they also accept, which clearly teaches that “God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him. . . . [He] hath made of one blood all nations of men.”​—Acts 10:34, 35; 17:26, “Authorized Version.”

In addition to adverse publicity, those who add to and take away from God’s revealed Word must also consider the principle found in God’s true Revelation: “If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life.”​—Rev. 22:18, 19, “AV.”