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President George W. Bush made two announcements in his televised speech on August 9, 2001. First, he would permit federal funding for experiments on stem cells derived from human embryos, but only on cells derived from embryos already killed by August 9. Second, he would appoint a Presidential Advisory Council on Bioethics, led by Leon Kass, to review this and other issues.

Longtime professor on the University of Chicago's prestigious Committee on Social Thought, Kass is an M.D. with a Ph.D. in biochemistry who has a background in National Institutes of Health research. He was a founding member of the board of the Hastings Center, the nation's premier bioethics think tank. I met with Kass at his American Enterprise Institute office in Washington. (Kass noted that his comments do not reflect the position of the federal government.)

How do you see the work of the President's Council on Bioethics?

Our first task is to do fundamental inquiry into the human and moral significance of these advances in biomedical science and technology—not just pronounce them good, bad, or indifferent. Second, we shall seek to delineate the ethical and social issues that particular advances may raise, and serve as a national forum for discussion. Finally, we need also to explore ways for fruitful international collaboration around some of these matters. The challenges that confront us are not mainly issues of good versus evil but rather issues of competing goods. Because the council has been liberated from the need to produce consensus, we are free to develop the competing arguments at the highest level.

It's very important that everybody in the discussion acknowledge that the other side also has something vital to defend here. For example, people who care about the sanctity of life should understand that the scientists who wish to experiment on embryos are also defending something very important when they seek in this way to cure disease. And the scientists have to understand that people who worry about the fate of the embryos are not simply practitioners of some narrow religious doctrine, but are defending the dignity of our humanity.

What kind of people has the President named to this body?

I don't want to call them experts; I rather distrust the "expert" label. But they are people who have backgrounds in medicine and science, law and public policy, philosophy and theology, and in the humanities and social sciences. Some of these were names I suggested, but the selections were made in the White House from a list of several hundred people.

What distinguishes this group of people is that they have been chosen with some view to their openness, to their thoughtfulness. They see that in some way the human future is at stake in these questions, and they are willing, with fear and trembling, to search for the wisest possible course as opposed to the cleverest possible arrangements.

This is a council on bioethics, rather than a council of bioethicists. By bioethics I mean the domain of difficulties that arise when human life as ordinarily lived is challenged by ideas and practices coming from modern biomedical science and technology. To address these concerns adequately, we need to go to deeper ground than that now occupied by mainstream bioethicists. We need thoughtful reflection about the riches and goodness (the ethics) of human life (bios), as they might be fostered and threatened by these new advances. The Greek word bios didn't simply mean life in the sense of animal life. Bios was a human life, the human life that is lived humanly. It finds its place really in the word biography, the writing of a human life. Biology meaning the science of all life is a late notion.

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June 10 2002, Vol. 46, No. 7