The World and Everything in It: December 29, 2025

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

ALBERT MOHLER: Good morning. This is Albert Mohler—speaking to you in my role as editor of WORLD Opinions.

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Thank you—and God bless you.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Good morning!

Today on Legal Docket, disability and the death penalty. 

And we remember a Supreme Court Justice who died this year.

AUDIO: The mistake that people made about David Souter was thinking that he was a conservative when he went on to the court and then magically became a liberal. Justice Souter was hiding in plain sight the whole time.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also today the Monday Moneybeat, looking at third quarter economic growth. Economist David Bahnsen standing by to talk about that and more.

And later, we remember the scientist behind one of the biggest breakthroughs in biology.

GURDON: At first it led to quite a lot of controversy.

ROUGH: It’s Monday, December 29th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Jenny Rough.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

ROUGH: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Trump-Zelenskyy » President Trump hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy Mar-A-Lago resort Sunday in South Florida to continue peace talks.

Trump praised Zelenskyy, calling him “brave” and struck an optimistic tone about ending the war. He said peace in Ukraine is “closer than ever” though he acknowledged that talks could still break down.

Trump also said he spoke with Russia leader Vladimir Putin before his meeting with Zelenskyy:

TRUMP:  We have two willing parties. We have two willing countries. They want to see it end. Look, the people of Ukraine wanted to end, and the people of Russia wanted it to end, and the two leaders want it to end.

US and Ukrainian diplomats have been working for weeks to hammer out a peace plan. And Zelenskyy has said that in his view, that proposal is nearly ready for US officials to begin talks with Moscow.

Zelenskyy said Sunday that his talks with President Trump would focus on the sequence of the steps outlined in that 20-point plan.

ZELENSKYY:  Our teams talked about strategy, how to, to make step by step and to bring this closer and we will discuss this strategy.

Security guarantees for Ukraine also a major topic.

Zelenskyy is still drawing a hard line at ceding territory to Russia.

Trump-Netanyahu to meet » Meantime, Trump is set to meet in Florida today with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mediators are pushing to move the deal into its next phase. That stage would involve Israeli forces pulling back from Gaza … and removing Hamas from power — to be replaced by a temporary governing authority.

Inside Israel, protests continue, with demonstrators insisting the process cannot move forward until the remains of the last deceased hostage are returned.

Northeast snowstorm » Severe winter weather snarled holiday traffic in parts of the country over the weekend, and there’s more of it on the way.

Several inches fell in New York City over the weekend, catching some tourists by surprise.

AUDIO:  We're from West Virginia, so we're not from here. Right? Going here for a three year anniversary, which was yesterday, we realized it was gonna snow [SIC]. We didn't even think it was coming.

Numerous airports have been dealing with delays after a busy travel weekend between Christmas and New Year’s.

Bob Oravec with the National Weather Service:

ORAVEC:  Storm track was a little, little atypical for some of the northeastern storms we've seen in the past, but it was pretty quick moving, but it did produce, uh, periods of heavy snow and there was some, uh, pretty decent accumulations.

More than 8 million Americans were still under winter storm warnings as of last night.

Forecasters say those warnings are driven by an intense bomb cyclone that’s bringing a mixture oFrom Nf snow, ice, rain and strong winds.

Severe winter weather is expected from Montana to Texas to Pennsylvania.

The National Weather Service on Sunday predicted 6 to 12 inches of snow in parts of the upper Midwest.

SBA regulations » Several provisions from President Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill are set to take effect on January 1st, and the White House says small businesses stand to gain the most.

The head of the Small Business Administration, Kelly Loeffler, says the changes give owners more certainty as they plan for the year ahead.

LOEFFLER:  A lot of it thanks to the Working Families Tax Cut that small businesses finally have certainty about what their tax rate's gonna be, that 20% pass through deduction.

Supporters say those tax breaks could free up cash for hiring, raises, and new equipment.

But states that adopt the cuts may also face tighter budgets, as the bill shifts more costs onto them for programs like Medicaid and SNAP.

New Years security » Security is expected to be tight for New Year’s celebrations this week across the country.

But the Department of Homeland Security is not tracking any specific credible threats. And DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin says no one should be deterred from celebrating.

MCLAUGHLIN:  You know, we're not going to bend the need to these cowards, these terrorists as we've seen in the past. And so, uh, Americans should go out. They should celebrate this great year we've had, be with friends and family, but just be aware of your surroundings.

Federal authorities say they foiled a bomb plot whereby suspects were planning to detonate explosives at multiple sites in Southern California.

A year ago, a man driving a truck in New Orleans rammed into a crowd at a New Year’s celebration, killing fourteen people.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: determining when intellectual disability should limit enforcing the death penalty. Plus, the Monday Moneybeat with David Bahnsen.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Monday the 29th of December.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: And I’m Jenny Rough. Time now for Legal Docket.

We’ll get to this week’s case in a moment.

But first, in these last few remaining days of 2025, we are remembering the lives of people notable in their fields who died this year.

In the field of the law and the courts, a former Supreme Court justice died—David Souter, May 8th … at age 85.

The soft-spoken Souter had arrived on the national stage in 1990.

SOUTER: I was in a state of virtual shock.

EICHER: Souter had a thin public record and only months on the federal bench, but the White House was playing it safe, thinking it had learned the lessons of the failed nomination of the well-known Robert Bork.

Former White House lawyer Doug Kmiec, who worked on the Souter nomination, later reflected to CNN—

KMIEC: At the time, David Souter was called the stealth candidate …

All the while, the White House was assuring Republicans that Souter was one of them.

Pressed on abortion, though, in his Senate confirmation hearing, Souter dodged again and again.

SOUTER: I have not got any agenda on what should be done with Roe v. Wade if that case were brought before me.

Senators tried different methods to coax Souter out.

Democrat Howard Metzenbaum brought up women facing unwanted pregnancies

METZENBAUM: And I would just like to get your … own thoughts of that woman's position under those circumstances.

ROUGH: Souter described a moment from his law-school days.

SOUTER: … I was on the board of freshman advisers at Harvard College … one afternoon, one of the freshmen assigned to me came to me in pretty rough emotional shape…

That afternoon, Souter said he spent hours counseling a distraught student who was considering a self-induced abortion. He cited this personal experience to demonstrate he understood the emotional gravity of the abortion debate.

SOUTER: And your question has brought that back to me, and I think the only thing I can add to that is I know what you were trying to tell me, because I remember that afternoon.

METZENBAUM: Well, I appreciate your response. I think it indicates that you have empathy for the problem.

EICHER: Souter had smooth sailing to confirmation 90 to 9, zero opposition from Republicans. But within two years, Souter would vote to reaffirm the right to abortion in Casey vs. Planned Parenthood. By the year 2000, Souter would vote to strike down a partial-birth abortion law.

Conservatives would point to that nomination and demand of future Republican presidents: No more Souters.

But years later, one of Souter’s former law clerks, legal scholar Noah Feldman, would argue that no one should’ve been surprised. The audio from PBS.

FELDMAN: The biggest mistake that people made about David Souter was thinking that somehow he was a conservative when he went on to the court and then magically became a liberal. In fact, Justice Souter was hiding in plain sight the whole time. He believed that the Constitution was not a dead document that should be interpreted according to what people thought 200 and some years ago, but rather was a document that needed to be interpreted in the light of our changing needs and circumstances.

ROUGH: Another former Souter clerk, Jeannie Suk Gersen, later reflected on her assignments to monitor emergency stay petitions from death-row inmates — often arriving on the very day of a scheduled execution.

In the Harvard Law Review, she wrote that the work took a physical toll— “… precipitating nausea, an inability to eat, and insomnia.”

And then, something worse—“… the capital cases became so routine… that a numbness that looked like indifference could set in.”

EICHER: That concern came to define David Souter’s later years on the bench, and as Gersen remembers it, Souter insisted in the “most empathetic and graceful manner imaginable” that she just needed to “pull it together”… her words: “a jolt essential to the ethical life of a young legal professional.”

Souter’s skepticism of the court’s role in administering the death penalty would increase—especially as cases grew more technical, more medical, and more dependent on judicial line-drawing.

ROUGH: Questions about who may be executed. About how courts measure intellectual disability. About whether legal standards can keep pace with human reality.

Those are not abstract questions. They continue to come before the court. And they bring us to the case the justices are considering now.

Hamm versus Smith—a death-penalty case that turns on how we measure the human mind, and where the Constitution draws its limits.

AUDIO: This is one of my favorite questions, and there is a very high chance that you will get it on the assessment test. How many triangles do you see? … You have four different choices: Choice A, nine triangles. Choice B, twelve.

EICHER: That may sound like a classroom riddle, but for Joseph Clifton Smith, the stakes are life and death. Twenty-eight years ago, Smith beat a man to death in Alabama. Today, he’s 55 years old and on death row. Smith has taken multiple IQ tests over his lifetime … and performed poorly; he argues his low scores make him ineligible for execution.

His challenge rests under the 8th Amendment’s clause banning “cruel and unusual punishment.”

ROUGH: While we often think of that clause as a ban on how we punish—outlawing torture or the rack—the Supreme Court has developed a second standard for who we punish. In 2005, the court ruled that juveniles cannot be executed. A few years prior, it said the same of the intellectually disabled.

Smith argues he belongs in that category.

John Fabian is a forensic psychologist and neuropsychologist. He spends his days evaluating the minds of men like Smith to determine whether they meet that constitutional threshold.

FABIAN: And that’s how I met Joseph, he goes by Jody Smith on Alabama death row a number of years ago.

10 years ago. Fabian served as an expert witness during an evidentiary hearing in the midst of legal challenges.

FABIAN: He presented as very low functioning verbally. And almost like he fit in the Of Mice and Men story where he just was low functioning and seemed almost like a big child.

ROUGH: Did he understand that he killed someone?

FABIAN: Yes.

ROUGH: And does he understand that he’s on death row?

FABIAN: Yes.

And that it’s wrong to kill someone. Also yes.

But his guilt isn’t the question. Sentencing is.

EICHER: Regardless of legal guilt, if he’s intellectually disabled, he cannot receive a death sentence.

To try to find out, Fabian administered the Stanford-Binet-5 IQ test to Smith.

FABIAN: And the average Joe’s going to be—we look at it as a standard score of 100 being 50th percentile.

Smith’s score was 78.

Generally, courts look for a score of 70 or below to find someone intellectually disabled. But Smith has taken multiple tests over his life, with scores ranging from 72 to 78. But because numbers tell only part of the story … Fabian also tested Smith’s “adaptive functioning” meaning, his actual ability to navigate the demands of everyday life.

FABIAN: Being able to utilize a bank account, fill out job applications, cook food, tend to hygiene, drive.

Fabian says Smith couldn’t do those things very well … and concluded that even though it was a close call … Smith fell into the category of intellectually disabled. Lower federal courts agreed and vacated Smith’s death sentence, but Alabama appealed to the Supreme Court … fighting to reinstate the death penalty.

ROUGH: The core dispute: how should a court handle a defendant with several different IQ scores? Robert Overing argued for Alabama … insisting Smith’s scores prove he is n0t disabled.

OVERING: Smith is not. He didn’t come close to proving an IQ of 70 or below.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh searched for a logical way to wade through so many tests, suggesting courts could use a median score or a composite of all of them. Alabama was open to the math, but Justice Kenaji Brown Jackson pushed back. She argued that focusing solely on IQ ignores the real-world struggle to function.

JACKSON: We also have allowed for evidence related to adaptive functioning to be taken into account when looking at intellectual functioning. So I think what you’ve done is shift this to be all about the IQ test in a way that’s not supported by our case law.

OVERING: IQ has always been the primary criterion by which intellectual—

JACKSON: Primary, but not sole

EICHER: Justice Elena Kagan seemed to agree that state courts have the discretion to at least consider secondary evidence. But Alabama warned that once you let in squishy evidence, like whether a defendant can buy car insurance or manage a bank account, the hard data gets ignored.

OVERING: They simply move on from IQ. And so once you open the door to this kind of balancing test … really malleable, really amorphous. … And so that evidence is not discipling the inquiry. It’s not adding more rigor to figuring out what the intelligence is.

Justice Samuel Alito echoed that concern, arguing that without a concrete standard. every case is a guessing game—

ALITO: Will there not be greater consistency and predictability and is that not one of the lodestars of the court’s death penalty jurisprudence as opposed to a situation where everything is up for grabs in every case.

ROUGH: Representing Smith , attorney Seth Waxman countered that Alabama’s own state law requires looking beyond raw IQ scores.

WAXMAN: I am holding all 12 decided, reported cases on this issue in Alabama, and there is not a single case, in which the court said we’re only going to look at the test scores, we’re not going to consider other evidence.

Ultimately, the Justices are looking for a stable standard. They have to balance two risks: (1) the risk that a defendant might “fake” a low score to stay alive, and (2) the risk that a state might repeatedly test a defendant until he finally gets the “passing” grade they need to proceed with an execution.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s time now to talk business, markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm the Bahnsen Group, and he is here now. Good morning to you.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Good morning. Nick, good to be with you.

EICHER: David, last week’s third-quarter GDP report came in much stronger than expected, with a headline growth number north of four percent—something we have not seen in quite a while. At first glance, that suggests an economy running really well despite tariffs, trade tensions, and month after month of recession warnings.

But when you see a GDP print like this, what is the first thing you want to break apart to understand what is actually going on?

BAHNSEN: I want to look at the ingredients that go into it for the quarter piece by piece, which I have done, and I want to look at it in the context of the full year.

First of all, let us remind everyone that the quarterly number is itself annualized. So when they talk about 4.3 percent for Q3, that is not the quarterly growth, but rather the annual growth of the quarter.

When we talk about this being a hot economy, the full-year GDP growth in 2024 was 2.8 percent. Full-year growth for 2025, with this strong quarterly number, may come in at 2.0 or 2.1. So in the best-case scenario, even with the strong Q3 number, you are going to have economic growth that is much less this year than the year before. And I assure you, nobody was talking a year ago about the economy being really, really strong.

The issue in the Q3 numbers is that the consumer was, and this is never a surprise to me, spending plenty of money. That is a big ingredient, the biggest in GDP the way they measure it. Consumption is always pretty much constant for American consumers. They love to spend money, and they generally do, unless they get cut off from credit.

The two volatile inputs to GDP throughout 2025—and you mentioned the tariff and trade impact, the up-and-down numbers, the real kind of unpredictable issues that are somewhat skewed by people trying to front-run trade policy—have been both inventories and then imports and exports. What you have seen is numbers go up and down around the reality, and I think the attempt to try to optimize what is going to happen around trade policy.

But the ingredient that I have not mentioned is the one I care about the most, and I have talked about it on this podcast many times, which is business investment, the productive inputs. Output might have grown about 1.5 percent this year. That is not recessionary, but it is definitely a slowdown.

I think that is the real impact of the tariff policy: we are getting a decline in output, even though, for now, consumers are still spending money.

So I will summarize a long answer with a pretty short summary sentence. The quarterly number was better than expected. The annual number is still not great. The reasons are somewhat predictable—slowing output, but a pretty healthy consumer.

EICHER: All right, well, this being the final Monday of 2025, it feels like a natural moment to step back and take stock of the full year. One of the more interesting year-end analyses came from the president of the Fed bank in Richmond, Virginia, Tom Barkin. He was asked to describe the economy in a single word. Barkin chose the word “resilience”—not because the year was calm or predictable, but more because it really wasn’t—that the economy absorbed a remarkable amount of stress.

When you look back on 2025 as a whole, does “resilience” ring true to you? And if you had to offer a single organizing word of your own, what would it be?

BAHNSEN: Well, I would absolutely echo the term “resilience,” and I would add uncertainty or ambiguity.

First of all, the resilience is not a 2025 feature. It is a reasonably permanent feature of the U.S. economy. Yes, there was a lot of resilience in 2025 through trade uncertainty, through a change in government programs with DOGE and a lot of these layoffs, a change in immigration and some of the illegal immigration that had taken place in the prior administration, which has an impact on the labor force, and just general policy changes from a new administration—and yet an economy that was reasonably resilient.

But nobody should be surprised at the U.S. economy being resilient from things as small-ball as policy changes. Our economy was pretty resilient through a global pandemic. They shut down our economy, and we bounced back pretty quickly.

There are a lot of market issues that have come up, but this dynamism in the U.S. economy embeds a certain resilience that is a feature and a pretty dependable condition. It is a testimony to the free-enterprise system that undergirds the U.S. economy.

When I refer to the uncertainty, it is also true that we right now have ambiguity in how exactly strong our labor market is. The unemployment rate is up. The number of new jobs being created is way down. Layoffs appear to be up. And yet there is some question as to where all of this is taking place.

My best guess, based on the indicators I see in the data, is that small businesses are struggling a bit more. Larger businesses, particularly those that are tech-adjacent, are doing better. And I have got to say, that is very different than what we saw in the first Trump administration. There were a lot of benefits in the first Trump administration from tax reform and regulation reform that accrued largely to small businesses.

2026 is going to be a different year. There are a lot of things I am going to be focused on. I do have my annual paper in heavy writing mode right now, and we will have more to say on that in a week as you and I talk next Monday.

But where things stand now, Nick, is that I think the U.S. economy is resilient, and I think the U.S. economy is facing some uncertainties.

EICHER: I know you are still deep in that analysis, but I know that in your data gathering you surely see the contours of what lies ahead. So I’ll ask for a really early preview, maybe just of the biggest questions you are asking about 2026 to come—the issues that will matter most over the next year.

BAHNSEN: Yes. Well, I have hinted at some already.

Whether or not the labor market issues are going to worsen—and if they do not worsen—is the Fed really going to go through with continuing to cut rates? I already know the answer to that one. The Fed is going to continue cutting rates, if nothing else because President Trump is appointing a new Fed chair in May of 2026, and that is a precondition of getting that job.

That then pivots to a different set of questions—what that would do to asset prices if the Fed continues to cut rates beyond the neutral rate they are trying to get to.

Monetary policy is on the horizon, but that is in conjunction with where things stand with labor markets. It is a frustration for a lot of us not to be able to get real clarity, but that is part of this—letting the process play out a little bit.

I would add that the longer-term impact of tariffs is a big question going into 2026. I think that 2025 has been an incredibly unhelpful year for those trying to analyze the impact of impediments to trade, because of the political organization of the topic. Those that favor tariffs are looking for any chance they can to spike a football. Those that oppose tariffs are looking for a chance to do the same with short-term data about how grocery prices go up or down in a given month.

That is simply not where the real economic issues are. Capital flows, capital expenditures from capital flows that set the stage for business investment into production and new goods and services, total trade, and the impact of these deals that have, in some cases, really been set, and in other cases allegedly been set for foreign investment into the U.S.—these are all unknowns.

These are bigger-picture issues, and in 2026 we are going to start to get a better look at them. You do not get that month by month in the immediate aftermath. Most of these deals are not even fully codified yet.

So that is what 2026 is going to be, and that is a little sneak preview of a few of the things on my mind.

EICHER: All right. David Bahnsen—founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group. He writes at DividendCafe.com and at WORLD Opinions. David, it has been a great year. We look forward to continuing the conversation in 2026

BAHNSEN: Looking forward to another year, my friend. Happy New Year!

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, December 29th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: And I’m Jenny Rough.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The beginnings of cloning.

Several giants of the scientific world died this year. Those names include Jane Goodall, who devoted her life to studying Chimpanzees in Tanzania... Richard Garwin, who authored the first hydrogen bomb design… and Edward Blake, who revolutionized DNA testing at crime scenes.

EICHER: Today, we devote our usual History Book time to one scientist in particular, John Gurdon…

He grew up studying the classics and died this fall as one of the fathers of modern-day gene editing.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy has his story.

MARY MUNCY: In 2012, John Gurdon won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But in 1947—when Gurdon was 15—he ranked at the bottom of his biology class.

His teacher was frank on his report card. Audio here from a 2012 interview with Cambridge University.

GURDON: ‘Any thought of Gurdon being a scientist is completely ridiculous and this would be total waste of time on his part and on those who would have the job of teaching him.’

That report card was the end of Gurdon’s early scientific studies and aspirations.

So he turned to the classics. But Gurdon’s mother saw he wanted to know things like how seeds turn into plants.

GURDON: How can it know how to do it? And that fascinated me. Whereas I wasn’t terribly interested in being able to translate the Iliad or Odyssey.

So, at age 18, she signed him up for extra schooling in zoology. He graduated university in 1956 and then he started his doctoral program, studying developmental biology.

His doctoral supervisor started him out replicating another scientists’ experiment, looking at how DNA works within a cell.

The original experiment transplanted a nucleus from one frog’s cell into a different frog’s egg.

For the earlier scientists, an egg only grew into a healthy adult if the transplanted nucleus was in its early stages of development. So, they theorized that there is a certain point when a cell’s purpose is locked in—a skin cell could no longer be reprogrammed to work in the eye or liver.

But in the mid-1950s, Gurdon transferred a nucleus from a mature frog’s gut cell into an egg and it grew into a healthy tadpole.

Gurdon had just cloned the first complex animal. Gurdon talked about his work with the University of California.

GURDON: At first it led to quite a lot of controversy. I mean, here was I, just a graduate student, sort of testing the conclusions of two highly respected workers. So naturally enough, people didn’t believe what I said. And I couldn’t see why.

So he went back to the lab with his professor, and they ruled out a few other possible reasons that the experiment could have worked. There were a few differences from the previous experiments, but the biggest one turned out to be just a different kind of frog.

And by the end of their testing, they were sure Gurdon had rewritten the way we understand a cell’s life cycle.

GURDON: What we now understand is that as cells develop, they contain the same set of genes, the only difference is something decides to read the skin genes in skin and brain genes in brain.

His discovery opened the door for the first cloned mammal in 1997.

CNN: Her name is Dolly… Scientists say a clone was created from a single cell taken from the udder of a sheep.

Then, a breakthrough in gene editing in 2012.

CBS MORNINGS: CRISPR could help rid us of diseases like cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and even HIV and cancer.

And earlier this year, scientists edited the first cells within a living human.

CBS MORNINGS: A baby named KJ born with a rare genetic disorder is the first person in the world to be successfully treated with a tailor-made gene therapy.

But this technology comes with some big ethical questions, things like what should we be allowed to choose about our genes? Does it stop with preventing chronic disease? What about eye or hair color?

How about performing the experiments at all? Should scientists be able to practice on human embryos?

Gurdon had his own answers to these questions.

In 2008, Gurdon told an interviewer that he was agnostic and disagreed with the Catholic Church’s view that embryos are early human life and shouldn’t be experimented on.

GURDON: I would say that this early human embryo is actually not a potential life and has no significant validity. I don’t think it may or may not have a soul, doesn’t matter. That fact is you’re not killing anything that’s significant and if you don’t do it, you’re then not taking advantage in the way that we could of relieving an awful lot of human suffering.

He told another outlet that same year that he was a humanist and valued progress over debating ethical questions. During a lecture, he said the fact that someone could possibly misuse science or technology shouldn’t impede scientific advancement.

GURDON: Because for example, if you really wanted to save lives, you would ban all cars and transportation. But we don’t choose to do that. There’s always an element of disadvantage to most advantages.

But in the same way the government puts traffic laws in place, scientific advancement needs safety measures too.

Cars need seatbelts and airbags to protect passengers… scientists need guardrails and ethics boards to protect them from man’s imperfect nature. It’s not clear whether Gurdon favored some guardrails, his studies of the classics should have made him wary. To put it another way, a well-rounded person looks backward to guide their progress forward.

Even so, Gurdon told interviewers that he was happy he chose a life of science.

GURDON: I would not have liked spending the whole of my life getting back to where someone was already. You like to go forward, not backward. That I think is the great appeal of science.

John Gurdon died in October. He was 92 years old.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Tomorrow: a look back at some of the biggest religious-liberty cases of 2025. And, a so-called anti-hate bill in Canada … it could make life difficult for those holding to a Biblical worldview. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Psalmist writes: “Let them praise the name of the Lord! For he commanded and they were created. And he established them forever and ever; he gave a decree, and it shall not pass away.” —Psalm 148:5, 6

Go now in grace and peace.

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