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But there is a significant difference: Clinton's plan created an ongoing incentive for private suppliers to destroy more embryos to supply federally funded researchers; the Bush plan limits the federal funding to the 60 existing lines of embryonic stem cells—and, of course, the morally licit adult and umbilical cord stem cells.

The Family Research Council's Ken Connor reminds us that seeking to reap a therapeutic harvest from illicitly derived stem cells is still "the fruit of the poisonous tree" and puts the President "on the wrong side of the principle." Then again, President Bush has actually pulled our society a few feet back up the slippery slope the Clinton administration put us on. And given the realities and pressures of this debate—in which high-profile conservative Republicans like Senator Orrin Hatch joined the opposition—we can give Bush's compromise two cheers.

But we give three cheers to his choice of advisers. Further decisions will be made in connection with a "a president's council to monitor stem-cell research." The council is to be headed by medical ethicist Leon Kass, who has most recently distinguished himself in his arguments against human cloning.

Kass is no interloper on scientific turf. He is a University of Chicago-trained surgeon with a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard. But unlike many scientists in this debate, he is not overly impressed with the moral bearings of those on the leading edge of research. In a paper published by the Rand Corporation, Kass writes about "the moral meaning of genetic technology, including stem-cell research": "We triumph over nature's unpredictabilities only to subject ourselves, tragically, to the still greater unpredictability of our capricious wills and our fickle opinions. Engineering the engineer, as well as the engine, we race our train we know not where. This. … is the truest moral meaning of today's wonderful biomedical technology. … It is only our infatuation with scientific progress and our naÏve faith in the sufficiency of our benevolently humanitarian impulses that prevent us from recognizing it."

• A powerful lobby of scientists, biotech capitalists, patient advocates, and politicians want to use human embryos (especially the frozen surplus from fertility clinics) to find miracle cures for millions of people with diseases caused by defective human genes or traumatic injury. It will be hard to say no to these advocacy groups when they promise amazing cures and a virtual fountain of youth in our brave new biotech future.

• "Any being that is human is a human being," wrote the Ramsey Colloquium in 1995. "If it is objected that, at five days or fifteen days, the embryo does not look like a human being, it must be pointed out that this is precisely what a human being looks like—and what each of us looked like—at five or fifteen days of development."

When prolife politicians forget that and appeal to the medical good that could come from embryonic stem-cell research, they create a class of subhumans (the unborn) and falsely pit embryos against the needs of desperately sick people. They also surrender a fundamental principle of prolife understanding: It is not right to sacrifice one human being for the good or convenience of another.

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September 3 2001, Vol. 45, No. 11