Getting started on the wrong foot. (The Culture War).

On January 16, 2002, George W. Bush announced the membership of his new President's Council on Bioethics, a body created to advise him on matters of medicine and morality--and science that goes bump in the night. Top on the deliberation agenda are developments and concerns surrounding cloning, particularly the experimental use of cloned human embryos. The council is chaired by University of Chicago ethicist Leon R. Kass and consists of seventeen others: lawyers, medical experts, philosophers, and theologians.

What can we expect from this council? Well, according to the January 17 Washington Post:

   Some observers say the president's council is politically stacked. Many of
   the 18 members, including Kass, are well-known conservative thinkers. And
   the executive director, a former aide to House Majority Leader Richard K.
   Armey (R-Texas), is a self-described Christian "proclaimer" who favors a
   greater religious presence in the schools and who once smashed a roommate's
   pornographic videocassette with his bare hands.

The fear is that, with such a makeup, the council will judge human embryos to be inherently deserving of protections. This will bolster the Bush administration's already clear agenda in this direction (see "Worth Noting," p. 45) and give further aid and comfort to those who would codify fundamentalist Christian doctrines into law.

To hear Kass tell it, however, the group will transcend politics and religion, giving matters a thorough study, and bring to bear a wide breadth of opinion before providing the president with the best advice available. After all, says Kass, "The future of humanity hangs in the balance." (Well, at least the immediate future of American biological science.)

As if to demonstrate how creative and broad his approach will be, Kass' first assignment to the council was for the members to read and prepare to discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The Birth-mark." Given the nature of its plot, however, this doesn't sound like a promising start. "The Birthmark"--along with Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" (which was given a Hollywood horror treatment starring Vincent Price)--is a tragic morality tale about the evils of biomedical hubris.

Set in the late eighteenth century, it begins with Aylmer, an eminent man of science, who has married the beautiful Georgiana, a woman with a small, red, hand-shaped birthmark on one cheek. Aylmer finds the mark charming at first but then, concluding that it mars an otherwise perfect countenance, induces her to feel likewise and eventually support his growing obsession to discover a way to remove it. With her eager consent, and with the help of his assistant Aminadab, "a man of low stature, but bulky frame, with shaggy hair hanging about his visage, which was grimed with the vapors of the furnace," Alymer sets to work in his lab. Chemical experiments of combination and analysis fill his days.

Finally the moment arrives when he is satisfied with the result. He triumphantly brings Georgiana a goblet of colorless liquid. "Unless all my science have deceived me,' he tells her, "it cannot fail." She quaffs the draught and immediately falls asleep. Time passes. The birthmark slowly fades away. But, alas, as it does, Georgiana's life fades as well. When the birthmark is gone, she is dead. Aylmer, in the incompleteness of his wisdom, had severed "the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in unison with a mortal frame" and thereby sacrificed happiness on the altar of perfection.

Here, then, we have an image of science as inadequate because it fails to consider the supernatural--and an image of scientists as prideful and self-defeating perfectionists who should be satisfied with nature. Such was a common literary view in 1843. But the advance of both time and science hasn't helped much. As Brian Stableford notes in John Clute and Peter Nicholls' Encylcopedia of Science Fiction, biological research continues to suffer from a negative literary image. Jurassic Park offers a familiar example. Indeed, the continual preaching "that all biological experimentation is a sin against God or Gala which will inevitably be punished by dire misfortune" is to Stableford "a kind of intellectual cowardice." Regarding biology, then, science fiction "has not yet attained a true maturity."

So why are the members of the President's Council on Bioethics setting the tone of their work with such antiscientific sentiments? They should be seeking objectivity and looking to the future with the aim of developing a set of ideals and standards that are as striking and revolutionary as the complex issues they are tackling.

Fred Edwords is editor of the Humanist and a former executive director of the American Humanist Association.