Bioethics, Bush style.

In September, a day after Massachusetts-based biotech lab Advanced Cell Technology, Inc., announced that it had coaxed embryonic stem cells into retinal cells, the company's medical director, Dr. Robert Lanza, received a visit from a uniformed police officer.

Lanza didn't know what to think. The mood in his office was tense. A few weeks earlier, a pipe bomb had exploded at another regenerative stem cell facility just a few miles down the road. Ever since President Bush banned federal funding for research on new embryonic stem cell lines in 2001, Lanza had seen financial backers shrink away as religious activists gained ground in the media, attacking researchers doing his sort of work.

The officer, it turned out, had a fifteen-year-old son who was going blind because of an eye disease known as macular degeneration. He was hoping that Lanza's cells would help. Lanza, a University of Pennsylvania Medical School graduate, former Fulbright scholar, and a nominee for the MacArthur "genius" award, was confident they could. But the cells are currently in his freezer awaiting a change in the political landscape.

"There's a black cloud that's been hanging over this research," says Lanza. That cloud has been created by Bush and legitimized by Dr. Leon Kass, head of the President's Council on Bioethics, a panel of experts who advise the Administration on the ethical implications of biomedical innovation. Since Bush's panel was convened in August 2001, the council has politicized biotech research to an extent previously unimaginable, say top scientists and progressive bioethicists. They charge that the council is promulgating Bush's anti-scientific policy agenda, and making it all but impossible for scientists like Lanza to do their work.

Kass, a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, promised to promote open debate about the important scientific questions of our time when he became head of the council in 2001. But critics say he hasn't quite kept his word.

Although the panel originally included some experts who might have disagreed with Bush's agenda, two of them saw their terms unrenewed, replaced with three new members significantly further to the right. At the same time, the council's staffmembers, who gather testimony to write reports, are linked to neoconservative and religious right think tanks, journals, and organizations.

"Normally, commissions try to effect some avowedly neutral stance, to hear from people across the spectrum," says Arthur Caplan, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "This group is way tilted to the right, and it's making recommendations from a perspective that a majority of the American people don't hold."

Kass disputes the charge. "This council is the most intellectually and ethnically diverse bioethics body ever," he told The Progressive in an e-mail interview. (See page 27.)

The panel is suggesting a course that bears a striking resemblance to a conservative agenda: an indefinite ban on human cloning, a moratorium on therapeutic cloning, and restrictions on embryonic stem cell research until the federal government can establish "ethically sound policies for the entire field."

Bush articulated his philosophy most recently in his State of the Union address: "To build a culture of life, we must also ensure that scientific advances always serve human dignity, not take advantage of some lives for the benefit of others.... I will work with Congress to ensure that human embryos are not created for experimentation or grown for body parts, and that human life is never bought and sold as a commodity."

Leon Kass was born in Chicago in 1939 to Jewish immigrants and grew up in a secular Yiddish-speaking, socialist home. He received his bachelor of science and his medical degrees at the University Of Chicago and received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard University in 1967. For a few years after graduation, he did research in molecular biology for the National Institutes of Health and published at least eight scientific papers in various medical journals.

He then switched gears to focus on the ethical implications of science, becoming one of the founders, in 1969, of the Hastings Center, the first American think tank for bioethics. He also served as executive secretary of the Committee on the Life Sciences and Social Policy of the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences for a couple of years. His writings have ranged from Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (1984) to Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying (2000).

For a long time, Kass was considered a brilliant, if somewhat "wacky," thinker, outside the mainstream of bioethical thought, says Daniel Wikler, professor of population ethics at Harvard University. The fact that Kass, dubbed by The New York Times as "the religious right's favorite intellectual," was suddenly catapulted onto the national stage is boggling to Wikler.

Kass's opposition to therapeutic cloning runs counter to the position taken by the National Academy of Sciences. "It's also opposite the American Medical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society, and the British Academy of Scientists," says Lanza. "These are the most prestigious and largest scientific and medical groups in the world, and I don't know one of them that opposes this research but Leon Kass does. He's not on the curve."

The roots of Kass's philosophy can be found in his article "The Wisdom of Repugnance," from his 1998 book, The Ethics of Human Cloning, which argues that our "yuck" response to certain ideas should be the basis of our ethical considerations.

"We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings not because of the strangeness or novelty of the undertaking, but because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear," he wrote. "Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder."

Alta Charo is professor of law and bioethics for the University of Wisconsin law and medical schools. She served on President Clinton's bioethics council. Kass "sees science as fundamentally disruptive of the social order," she says. "He's romantic, in my view, inappropriately and unduly, about the nature of human relations in the absence of technological advances we now take for granted, and which he finds 'dehumanizing.'"

The original eighteen-member bioethics panel convened under Kass in 2001 included a range of experts such as Yale Law School Professor Stephen Carter and University of California cell biologist Elizabeth Blackburn.

But its first executive director, Dean Clancy, was a senior policy adviser to former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Clancy is "a self-described Christian 'proclaimer' who favors a greater religious presence in the schools," wrote The Washington Post. Similarly, Eric Cohen, the council's senior research adviser, is founder and editor of The New Atlantis, a publication of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a neoconservative think tank.

People for the American Way, a progressive watchdog group, has exposed several links between council members and the religious or political right. Council member Robert George serves on the boards of directors of a series of rightwing groups, including the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Institute for American Values, and the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Francis Fukuyama is a member of the Project for the New American Century, Charles Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist, is a contributor to the conservative Weekly Standard. George and another council member, Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard University law professor, are both on the board of the anti-gay Alliance for Marriage.

Council member James Q. Wilson, a political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, was chairman of the board of academic advisers of the American Enterprise Institute and served on the policy board of Ward Connerly's American Civil Rights Institute.

And several members of the panel, including George, Glendon, and Gilbert Meilaender, are affiliated with First Things magazine. That magazine is published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life, an educational organization created "to advance a religiously informed public policy for the ordering of society."

"Overall, there is a sense of an interlocking network of conservative and neoconservative figures, appearing together at fora, writing for and editing the same journals, and working with one another as members or staff within a small circle that orbits its chair, Leon Kass," wrote Charo in "Passing on the Right: Conservative Bioethics Is Closer Than It Appears," an article that appeared in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics in the Summer 2004 issue.

Jonathan Moreno, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia, said the congregation of thinkers was alarming. "The profile of this group leads one to think they were appointed for a specific purpose, which is to place high-biotech under a microscope," he said.

It didn't take long before the few dissenters on the panel started to feel that their perspectives weren't being adequately addressed.

"At council meetings, I consistently sensed resistance to presenting human embryonic stem cell research in a way that would acknowledge the scientific, experimentally verified realities," Blackburn, one of two cell biologists on the commission, wrote in an article that appeared in The Washington Post. "The capabilities of embryonic versus adult stem cells, and their relative promise for medicine, were obfuscated."

Council member Janet Rowley, a professor of medicine, molecular genetics, cell biology, and human genetics at the University of Chicago Medical School, says she had concerns that staff members weren't adequately conveying the dissenting views in their published reports. "On occasion when these discrepancies were brought to their attention, they were more or less ignored," she said.

Blackburn's tenure on the council came up for review in March 2004, but it was not renewed. Since then, she has publicly criticized the council for suppressing opposition. Blackburn and Rowley wrote an article for the journal PLOS Biology called "Reason As Our Guide," saying the reports "may have ended up distorting the potential of biomedical research and the motivation of some of its researchers." And in her Post article, "Stacking the Bioethical Dice Game--White House Uninterested in Diverse Scientific Views," Blackburn wrote, "Narrowness of views on a federal commission is not conducive to the nation getting the best possible advice."

Asked why Blackburn wasn't kept on the council, Kass said, "Blackburn's replacement was a personnel issue, not an ideological or political one. Many people who share her views remain on the council, fully active and undeterred; none has publicly endorsed Blackburn's views about why she wasn't renewed."

But Blackburn has the support of two Democratic legislators. In a letter to the President, California Congressman Henry Waxman and New York Congresswoman Louise Slaughter wrote that the Administration "misled the public" with that characterization of the removal. "We have learned ... that Dr. Blackburn was dismissed soon after she objected that a major council report was misleading with regard to stem cell research."

At the same time, another dissenting council member, William May, professor of ethics, emeritus, at Southern Methodist University, was also not renewed. Kass says May asked to be let go. May didn't respond to requests for comment. Some observers suggest he was dismissed because in December 2003, during a visit to Mary Washington College in Virginia, May called the Administration's new Medicare drug policy "mysticism of the marketplace run amok."

The three new council members appointed following the nonrenewals were more in step with Kass's ideology and approach. Life Site News, a web portal affiliated with Canada's pro-life Campaign Life Coalition, called the new panelists "three high-profile individuals who have been outspoken in their criticisms of embryonic stem cell research, abortion, and the silencing of the religious voice in public life."

One new member, Diana Schaub, chair of the department of political science at Loyola College in Maryland, has been enthusiastic in her support for Kass. Her review of the council's cloning report in the January 2003 issue of First Things called it "reminiscent of The Federalist Papers, a work that Jefferson judged to be 'the best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written.'" In the same article, Schaub called cloning "slavery plus abortion."

Another new member of the council is Benjamin Carson, director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University and a motivational speaker who often laments that "we live in a nation where we can't talk about God in public," according to The Washington Post. His philosophy, outlined in books and interviews, is "Think BIG," in which the letter B stands for Books, I stands for "In-Depth Learning," and G is for "God: Never get too big for Him."

The third new member selected for the bioethics council is Peter Augustine Lawler, a professor of government at Berry College in Georgia and author of Aliens in America: The Strange Truth About Our Souls, published by ISI Press in 2002. The American Library Association description of his book says, "Lawler sees all Americans as aliens, in the Christian sense that all souls rightly belong to God and find their rest, their home, only in him. From the Christian perspective, liberalism's commitment to equality, the individual, and happiness against hierarchy, community, and reality seems so much vain perfectionism."

Immediately after the appointments were announced last March, more than 200 of the country's leading bioethicists signed an open letter to the President expressing concern that the credibility of the council had been "severely compromised."

"The credentials of these three are sparse and dubious," says Professor Caplan, who penned the letter. "Most of the new members haven't published much in the peer-reviewed literature; they are lightweights when it comes to bioethics. I can think of hundreds of people who have more claim to be on the bioethics council than any of them, including some conservatives."

Rowley, who remains on the council, says the panel has become less diverse since these new appointments.

"In terms of basic molecular biology, [Blackburn] was the only representative, and her loss to the council has been substantial," Rowley says. "The council has suffered because of the constriction of the points of view represented. It's a less intellectually, philosophically rich council than it was."

Rowley says Kass has discontinued the process of taking votes on issues and "runs this like a graduate seminar," she says. "You don't get council members who are expressing points of view that are at variance with the President's point of view."

Following Bush's lead, Massachusetts Republican Governor Mitt Romney announced in March that he would veto legislation to give scientists more freedom to conduct embryonic stem cell research. But the veto is likely to be overridden since the legislation passed by a lopsided margin.

For Lanza, that offers some hope that the fifteen-year-old son of a police officer may be able to get treatment to prevent his impending blindness.

"We have these cells frozen away in our freezer for nine months, and this kid is going to be blind for the rest of his life," says Lanza. "The time urgency here is very powerful."

Lanza says the Bush Administration's hostility could still exact a high cost. He has calculated that 3,000 Americans die every day from diseases he believes could be treated with this technology--including diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, even AIDS and cancer.

"We can't just wait this out," says Lanza, "because there's a human tragedy unfolding here as the President plays political football with the religious right."

Interview with Dr. Leon Kass

Dr. Leon Kass is head of the President's Council on Bioethics. Nina Siegal conducted this interview by e-mail for The Progressive.

Q: You have stated that the debate on stem cell research and human cloning comes down to "whose life matters most: the lives of sick children and adults facing risks of decay and premature death, or the lives of human embryos who must be directly destroyed in the process of harvesting their stem cells for research." Do you believe that frozen embryos from artificial insemination that may never be implanted in a womb constitute a life that cannot be destroyed?

Dr. Leon Kass: "Yes" or "no" questions don't do justice to the subject or my own views. As a biologist, I am in awe of an embryo's developmental potential, a potential that does not disappear just because its creators no longer want it for baby-making purposes. I don't regard the early embryo morally as equivalent to a newborn child, but I cannot prove my moral intuition nor disprove the opposing view. The early human embryo, especially in dish or freezer, is mysterious in its being and how to regard it remains a puzzle. I therefore shy away from exploiting it for our purposes.

Q: Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics for the University of Wisconsin law and medical schools, in her recent article, "Passing on the Right," accuses the panel of "politicizing public bioethics to a degree heretofore unknown and stifling the voices of dissenting members." How do you respond?

Kass: This council is the most intellectually and ethically diverse bioethics body ever. (How many prolifers or Republicans were on Clinton's commission on which Professor Charo served?) We were deliberately constituted for just such diversity. Nearly half of the original members didn't vote for President Bush, and no one cared. We were charged with producing the best arguments both for and against any particular course of action, and that we have assiduously attempted. In every council report, all members had the right to append personal statements, and most of us have done so. No one attending our meetings or reading our transcripts and reports could accuse us of bias or suppressing dissent.

Q: In particular, Charo and some scientists charge that Elizabeth Blackburn and William May were dismissed for dissenting in the cloning report and because they were the most vocal advocates of stem cell research on the panel.

Kass: Blackburn and May were not dismissed. They finished their full two-year term but were not renewed for a second. May, my esteemed and wise friend of thirty years, gave several indications that he wanted to step down; he then became consultant to the council's aging project. Blackburn's replacement was a personnel issue, not an ideological or political one. Many people who share her views remain on the council, fully active and undeterred; none has publicly endorsed Blackburn's views about why she wasn't renewed. Hasn't it occurred to anyone that her vituperative conduct following her non-renewal might display something relevant to her nonrenewal?

Q: Dr. Blackburn has written: "At council meetings, I consistently sensed resistance to presenting human embryonic stem cell research in a way that would acknowledge the scientific, experimentally verified realities. The capabilities of embryonic versus adult stem cells, and their relative promise for medicine, were obfuscated." How do you respond?

Kass: Nonsense. The council heard multiple presentations from leading stem cell scientists and commissioned scientific review articles that were published verbatim in our report, "Monitoring Stem Cell Research." Drafts were repeatedly reviewed by council members, including Dr. Blackburn, and we incorporated nearly all suggested changes. Its scientific chapter was read by three independent stem cell researchers, each pronouncing it scientifically accurate and fair. On one point (only) we opposed Blackburn: She wanted the report to say categorically that embryonic stem cells are going to be better than adult stem cells. We refused on good scientific grounds: No one today knows enough to support such a claim.

Q: In your writings, you often talk about the idea of human dignity and your concern that science can have a negative impact on it. Some scientists interpret this as an antiscientific position, and that it could stand in the way of important medical or scientific advances that could save lives.

Kass: I greatly esteem biomedical advance and properly appreciate its promise in alleviating human suffering. But I am concerned lest that goal be pursued in ways that threaten human freedom and human dignity. Some reflexively regard any criticism of any use of biotechnology as an attack on science. It is not. Everyone should want to bequeath to our children a world that protects and advances both human health and human dignity. Medical progress must not be bought at the price of degrading others or ourselves, via unethical experiments on human subjects or uses of biotechnology that lead us toward a Brave New World.

Nina Siegal is a freelance writer based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Brooklyn, New York.