New Presidential
Bioethics Commission
The previous President’s Council on Bioethics was terminated before its
time by President Obama back in June. Its charter was scheduled to
expire in September, and there was some thought it was booted early to
clear the deck for a new bioethics group aligned with the president.
But no new bioethics council was formed to fill the void. Seems likely
the old bioethics council was just giving contrary signals to the
President (10 of the 18 members criticized the President after his
March 9 speech where he opened the possibility of using more human
embryos for research, including creating cloned human embryos for
experiments.) Given that the NIH was preparing to promulgate new
guidelines for using human embryos, including the steps to take for
their destruction to allow federal taxpayer funding of their harvested
cells, the “President’s” bioethics council presented an official
unwelcome burr under the saddle.
Finally, well after the old council’s term would have expired, we now
have the announcement that a new Presidential Commission for the Study
of Bioethical Issues will be established (Executive Order 13521). The
announcement actually was made a week ago, on November 24. However, as
of this writing the Executive Order still does not appear on the White
House website (they must have been in a hurry to get to the state
dinner.) However, the Executive Order was finally published in the
Federal Register on Monday, November 30. The press release names the
chair (Amy Gutmann, President of the University of Pennsylvania) and
vice chair (James Wagner, president of Emory University) but does not
name the other members of the commission (not more than 13 members
total.) An interesting part of the Executive Order states that “at
least one and not more than three of whom may be bioethicists or
scientists drawn from the executive branch, as designated by the
President.” So, there is a chance to seed the commission with
like-minded folks. Nature notes that the new group is “explicitly
charged with recommending legislative and regulatory action and
promises to have more influence on policy.” The article also quotes
George Annas opinion that the previous bioethics council had a “narrow,
embryo-centric agenda”. Nothing could be further from the truth, as
evidenced by the range of topics covered by the previous council,
including aging, genetic screening, and determination of death (the
council’s archived website should soon be available from the National
Reference Center for Bioethics Literature).
It will be interesting to see the final composition of this new
presidential bioethics group, and whether they can live up to the
openness, education of the public, and representation of diverse views
seen with the last bioethics council. If not, it will just be a rubber
stamp for presidential policies.
Contact: David Prentice
Source:
FRCBlog
Publish
Date:
December
1,
2009
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