Bush's Advisers on Ethics Discuss Human Cloning
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/18/politics/18ETHI.html?ex=1012021200&en=a040751be6acaf38&ei=5040
January 18, 2002
WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 — President Bush's
newly appointed Council on Bioethics, a collection of 18 doctors, legal
and ethical scholars, scientists and a journalist, met for the first time
today and plunged into the thorny issue of human cloning, which Mr. Bush
has said he opposes for any reason.
The president's spokesman, Ari Fleischer,
restated that opposition this morning, just as Mr. Bush's ethics advisers
were gathering in a hotel ballroom across town from the White House. After
the panel adjourned, Mr. Bush received its members in a private meeting
in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.
"You can help be the conscience of
the country," the president said, according to a transcript of the session
released by the White House.
Mr. Bush said the panel would help
people "come to grips with how medicine and science interface" with "the
dignity of life, and the notion that life is — you know, that there is
a Creator."
In stepping into the cloning controversy,
the panel is taking on two questions: whether cloning should be used to
make babies that are, essentially, genetic replicas of adults, and the
more complex question of whether scientists should clone embryos to obtain
cells that might treat disease.
This second question pits scientists
and patients advocates against some religious leaders and conservatives,
who oppose the work because it involves destroying embryos.
The council is beginning its deliberations
as these issues are about to burst back into the news. On Friday morning,
the National Academy of Sciences is expected to release a report on the
medical and scientific aspects of cloning. At the same time, the Senate
is considering legislation, passed by the House of Representatives and
backed by Mr. Bush, that would ban all cloning.
Despite the press of events, the
panel's chairman, Dr. Leon R. Kass, a bioethicist who has written papers
strongly opposing cloning, set no timetable today for the panel to issue
a report.
Dr. Kass, who is on leave from the
University of Chicago and is now affiliated with the American Enterprise
Institute, a conservative research institution, said that he felt obliged
to "take up the policy options," but wanted a thorough discussion, not
a rushed one.
"We are not going to be driven by
the need to feed into the Senate's debate," he said.
The council, whose members were named
by the White House late Wednesday afternoon, was created by President Bush
in August as part of his decision announcing limited federal financing
for human embryonic stem cell research, an issue closely intertwined with
cloning.
Critics are complaining about the
council's makeup, noting that 14 of its 18 members are men and that most
are white. Advocacy groups for patients are particularly upset because
the White House did not name any such advocates to the panel.
"These are questions that involve
delicate balancing of costs and benefits," said Peter Van Etten, president
of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, "and understanding the benefits
is critically important. The patients bring that. When the decisions are
made, that voice will not be there."
While Mr. Van Etten said his group
had not lobbied for a council member favoring its views, , representatives
for the actor Christopher Reeve, who is paralyzed as a result of a spinal
cord injury, reportedly did press the White House to include him.
In opening today's meeting, Dr. Kass
said that while the panel's work was delayed by the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, those events had also created a new moral seriousness in the
nation.
"It has been a long time," he said,
"since the climate and mood of the country was this hospitable for serious
moral reflection."
At times, today's session seemed
more like a graduate seminar at a university than a meeting of a government
body.
As an icebreaker, Dr. Kass scheduled
a discussion of a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne called "The Birthmark,"
a tale of a scientist who marries a beautiful woman with a tiny blemish
on her left cheek and then kills her in trying to remove it.
From there, the conversation ran
the gamut, from debate over whether parents seeking egg donors should take
the donors' SAT tests into account, to whether making babies the old-fashioned
way — by sexual intercourse between a man and a woman — has any intrinsic
worth.
There was little consensus on any
of these matters, although most panelists seemed opposed to making babies
by cloning, which Gilbert C. Meilaender, a professor of Christian ethics
at Valparaiso University, described as "a natural repulsion."
One member, Charles Krauthammer,
a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post and the only nonacademic
on the panel, warned that scientists were on the verge of "creating a class
of superhumans."
Another, Janet D. Rowley, a molecular
geneticist at the University of Chicago, insisted that Mr. Krauthammer's
vision was 100 years away, and urged the members to focus on more pressing
scientific concerns.
A third member, William B. Hurlbut,
a biologist at Stanford University, delivered an impassioned speech about
the meaning of life.
"Where do we get our minds?" Dr.
Hurlbut asked. "What does constitute the meaningful reality of our lives?"
At the end, Dr. Kass declared, "This
has been a day of experiment."
The session will continue on Friday.
The following are the members of
the council:
Dr. Kass, committee chairman, bioethicist,
professor, University of Chicago.
Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, professor,
biochemistry and biophysics, University California at San Francisco.
Dr. Stephen Carter, law professor,
Yale University.
Dr. Rebecca Dresser, law professor,
Washington University.
Dr. Daniel Foster, chairman of internal
medicine department, University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.
Dr. Francis Fukuyama, professor of
international political economy, Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, director,
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Dartmouth College.
Dr. Robert P. George, professor of
jurisprudence, Princeton University.
Dr. Alfonso Gomez-Lobo, professor
of metaphysics and moral philosophy, Georgetown University.
Dr. Mary Ann Glendon, professor of
law, Harvard University.
Dr. Hurlbut, consulting professor
in human biology, Stanford.
Mr. Krauthammer, columnist, The Washington
Post.
Dr. William F. May, emeritus professor
of ethics, Southern Methodist University.
Dr. Paul McHugh, director of the
department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Meilaender, professor of Christian
ethics, Valparaiso University.
Dr. Rowley, professor of medicine,
molecular genetics and cell biology, and human genetics, University of
Chicago.
Dr. Michael J. Sandel, professor
of government, Harvard.
Dr. James Q. Wilson, emeritus professor
of management and public policy, University of California at Los Angeles.
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Copyright 2002 The New York Times
Company